Mike Harrison (chief executive of the Maldon & South Chelmsford PCT) now turned his attention to finding a more permanent home for the ‘New Surgery’. He quickly settled on the ground floor of the McCarthy & Stone premises in Tylers Ride (which later became known as ‘White Elephant Way‘ as the hugely expensive and underused police station shared this address.)

We were told that M&S couldn’t put flats for the elderly on the ground floor as it was in the flood plain. At about that time there was a glut of ground floor properties available in the town centre – presumably for much the same reason. I did some asking around and found that suitable ground floor properties were available for as little as around £18,000 per annum.

A public consultation was organised and a total of 53 people in a town with a population at that time of some 18,500 thought this was a splendid idea despite the fact that they had not been given any idea of how much the additional expenditure involved in this would impact on the funds left over for patient care.

What was laughingly described as a “business plan” was put together by a PCT employee on the basis of this consultation. A lease agreement was drawn up and we were told the new premises would cost £70,000 per annum and got the impression this would be on the basis of a 10 year lease. It later transpired that the correct figure out was £106,000 per annum – and they’d signed up for a 20 year period. So with its last gasp the Maldon and South Chelmsford PCT had committed over £2 million of NHS funds to these premises (ocer and above the cost of running the surgery oin a day-to-day basis. And yet when Mid Essex PCT took over from the M&SC PCT this was never questioned despite the fact that all the New Surgery patients had previously been accommodated in one of the pre-existing the town centre surgery premises … and the total annual cost to the NHS of the three pre-existing town centre surgeries (which between them looked after several times as many patients as were registered at The New Surgery) was considerably less than the cost of this one property.

The way this was handled put me in mind of a Harry Enfield sketch called ‘I saw you coming’ in which he plays a Notting Hill antiques shop salesman who sells junk to the gullible wealthy for large quantities of money.

I put together a low resolution/excessively compressed video diary at the time. The first section of this segment deals with a subject which has been in the news recently – the parking problem in the town centre. Approx 2 mins 30 seconds into the recording is a comparison of the cost of the New Surgery premises with other surgeries in the area.

At about the time the deal for the new premises was going through, Mike Harrison traded in his tatty old saloon car for a brand-new Mercedes sports car. We heard that his explanation for this was that his wife ran a very successful sandwich making business and he helped out by making deliveries on his way to work. She had seemingly funded the purchase of this vehicle. I must admit to having had some uncharitable thoughts about this until I looked into it further and discovered that

Mercedes sports cars were in fact the vehicle of choice for sandwich makers because their turn of speed ensured that the product reached customers in peak condition. The principal downside was that the capacity of such cars necessitated several delivery runs each day. Images of the new sports car can be found 5 minutes into the ‘video diary’.

The new premises were lavishly kitted out. The treatment room was fully equipped as a minor surgery ‘operating theatre’ although there was little outward sign of much minor surgery taking place there … most of it being performed by Dr Ramesh Patel at Brickfields Surgery and myself at Greenwood Surgery.

There were attempts made to increase usage of the New Surgery in order to justify the cost. So, for example, if a private company wanted to set up an additional NHS funded ultrasound service it would approach the town centre Health Clinic management and be told that it would cost approx £100 per session and availability couldn’t be confirmed for around a month but if they rang the New Surgery they would be told it could have a room free of charge and could start immediately. Moreover, the antenatal clinics were transferred to the New Surgery without any consultation with the local practices – so we lost touch with our patients and yet we were expected to deal with problems that arose whilst working in the dark.

Meanwhile cuts were being made which the PCT didn’t admit were linked to the substantial amounts that were being lavished on the New Surgery … but it was strongly suspected they were a direct consequence. One example was the £21,000 annually which had been made available to SWF for start-up schemes (like the ultrasound service) and another was cutting the funding for GP appraisals. I sent a reply to the head honcho of the Local Medical Committee about the appraisal problem explaining that this and other attempts to improve quality were the cherry on the cake as far as Greenwood Surgery was concerned. My concern was that we lacked the cake itself – the wherewithal to provide a decent basic service to our patients. The only way we could do it, as previously mentioned, was for me to work for nothing for much of the time and (as in the photo) occasionally make payments into the practice account from savings in order to be able to pay the staff.

In 2007 the chair of the commissioning group which covered SWF and the Dengie (Dr Hamid Latif) asked me for comments about the situation. I made some suggestions but the problem was that NHS was already locked into the deal for the New Surgery and there was no practical way of stemming the haemorrhage of scarce NHS funds. In my response I predicted the sale of the freehold town centre NHS Health Clinic which eventually went ahead (despite a public outcry) in order to plug a hole in the finances.

In all my time in South Woodham this was the biggest and best example of NHS mismanagement and the squandering of scarce NHS resources. There were significant consequences for patient care – but, as is usual in the NHS, no publicised enquiry was ever held.

Dr John Cormack