“Does your wife, or anyone else, drive your car doctor?” was, I thought, a strange question to be asked of a consultant by a clinical director.

But apparently someone - motive as yet unclear - thought his job plan meant he should have been somewhere else other than the local private hospital. So, rather than the trust first simply checking his diary and the job plan, officers of the NHS Fraud Squad instead spent months trying to get pictures of his car parked at the aforementioned private hospital.

They only succeeded in getting four pictures. Goodness knows how much time they spent hiding in the rosebushes waiting to take pictures of the car that “did not attend”.  

What a waste of money! That it was parked there was never going to be a contested issue. Just how much is being paid by way of covert surveillance, and how far are we from becoming a ‘stitch up’ society?  

Few would argue that fraud, when uncovered, means the perpetuator should be bought to account. But I would also like to think that we are living in a fair society and that the NHS should only revert to secret-service style tactics after very careful thought.

This is by no means the first occasion that I have encountered consultants being subject to such scrutiny and they might never find out if they have, if the fraud squad decides that there is insufficient evidence to proceed.

I was involved in one case where the NHS Fraud Squad involved the Crown Prosecution Service who determined there was no basis to proceed; but the trust went ahead anyway because the lesser burden of proof was in its favour. More often than not these Fraud Squad activities take place with the ‘suspect’ completely unaware of what is going on.

My point is that if the employer suspects infringement of the rules, is it right to go straight to the world of hidden cameras and enforcement officers hiding in the hedgerows at vast public expense? Or would it be better if a quiet word was first spoken in the ear?

Clearly much will depend on the severity of what is being investigated; and whether the source of the information is credible as opposed to malicious - and there are far too many of those. But I just worry that the fraud squad is becoming a weapon of first rather than last resort. Either way it saddens me that spy cameras seem as much part of the NHS, as speed cameras are to local authority revenue streams.