Held on Tuesday, 28 October 2025 at 6:30pm

Venue: Apothecaries' Hall, Black Friar's Lane, London EC4V 6EJ

Presenting Toil and Soul (John Locke Lecture)

To be given by Dr Rupal Shah

John Locke lecture 2025

Within the prevailing culture of new public management and our drive for efficiency, clinicians are interchangeable, just as patients’ stories are standardised. In this talk, Dr Shah will propose that we should be fighting to retain soul and meaning within our work. She will argue that we need to fundamentally change our approach to efficiency, particularly in the context of AI.

Dr Rupal Shah is a GP trainer in Battersea and an Associate Dean working in the London Professional Development Team.

She is co-author of 'Fighting for the Soul of General Practice- the algorithm will see you now', with its linked podcast series; and has written a series of peer-reviewed medical education articles introducing the 'hermeneutic window', which forms the basis of her PhD thesis. She is co-editor of 'Finding Meaning in Healthcare - looking through the hermeneutic window' and the 'Finding Meaning in Healthcare' podcast series. She is a member of the RCGP Ethics Committee, RCGP overdiagnosis group, and part of the core team of the 'Human Values in Healthcare Forum'.

Presenting Unheard: On medical silencing (Sydenham Lecture)

To be given by Dr Rageshri Dhairyawan

Sydenham lecture 2025

When Dr Rageshri Dhairyawan was admitted to hospital as a patient she didn’t receive the pain medication that she told them she needed, despite her being a senior doctor. It was in that moment she understood that something was deeply wrong with our healthcare system - medical silencing is pervasive and hindering patient safety and health equity.

In Unheard, Dr Dhairyawan takes us on a journey through history to show how silencing patients has been ingrained in medicine from its inception. Western medicine has been built on the assumption that power should always lie with the doctor, and that patients should be powerless to decisions made about their body if it is done to make them well. This, alongside the prejudices of society, has led to dramatic gaps in medical knowledge because for centuries people have not been heard. Dr Dhairyawan offers a way to reshape our health system for a future where active and engaged listening is the new frontier.

Dr Rageshri Dhairyawan is an NHS Consultant in Sexual Health and HIV Medicine at Barts Health NHS Trust and Deputy Director of the SHARE Collaborative, Queen Mary University of London. Her clinical work, research and advocacy focus on improving health equity, Rageshri has held numerous national charity and policy positions and regularly works with patient organisations. She was named as a ‘Woman Changing the World’ on International Women’s Day in 2019 by iNews. Rageshri is the author of Unheard: The Medical Practice of Silencing (Trapeze, 2024) and has contributed an essay to the anthology No One Talks About This Stuff (Unbound, 2024).