Our PCT might as well have moved to Mumbai. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against Mumbai – Alice who has helped me restore my computer lives in Mumbai and Nigel who checks that my warranty details are correct when I get my car serviced comes from nearby Delhi.

At least he tells me it’s nearby, but he says he doesn’t know Alice.

Anyhow, this week I rang up the PCT to speak to a former colleague who I used to work with in the primary care team.

The PCT had moved over to VOIP phones years ago, so I just dialled his name into the system and voila! The phone rang.

I sorted out the issue I had about some data and then we chatted. Asking about the rest of the old team in the office, Sasha turned quite vague.

Turns out some of them went quite quickly, others opted to babysit in CCGs, and those too valuable to let go or re-deploy in limbo were stood in a corner and water-boarded.

Finally Sasha was ‘promoted’ to a new job, 12 miles down the road, with more responsibility, less staff, a new and different set of challenges, which does not fit with his old skills and aptitude, and, to cap it all, a set-up akin to a Dickensian call centre.

Of course Sasha is happy to have a job – he has a family and a mortgage – but he tells me that sometimes he feels he would have been able to deliver a better quality service, with some innovation, productivity and preventive work, if he’d been allowed to get on with the job he was trained for in the place where he had chosen to work with the people who picked him to work there!

We’ve got a lot in common, GPs and NHS managers.