I received a threatening email this week. Our poor beleaguered managers have been chased by the Department of Work & Pensions - yes, those dear civil servants who strike gloom into your heart when you open the manilla envelope, hoping in vain for compromising pictures of your clinical director, but facing the inevitable DWP message: “We are writing to you about Mr X who is claiming (in our opinion) fraudulent amounts of incapacity benefit…”

You then have to answer 30 ridiculous questions about whether a patient you saw once, 6 months ago, in a 50 patient fracture clinic can carry a saucepan 5 yards, 10 yards, 50 yards; lift a bag of shopping up 5 stairs, 10 stairs, 50 stairs; make love every 5 days, 10 days, 50 days - and other such nonsensical details that even a consultant psychiatrist, with two and a half hours to take a history, wouldn’t bother with.

So, you grit your teeth, pick up your pen, and exercise your discretion as a fully trained NHS consultant by writing: “Please pass to the registrar,” on the front of the form.

As a registrar, I had the rare talent of actually extracting some cash from the (then known as) Benefits Agency for the honour of filling these out. It was only about 20 quid, and it required about 32 forms to claim it, but I knew how much the civil servants hated administering it, so it was worth every underpaid minute in childish satisfaction.

As a consultant, these forms constantly dog you, and also lead to a string of patients seeking review appointments, so that they can tell the DWP: “‘I’m still seeing my doctor,” when their benefits start to get cut.  

Imagine my distress when finding the DWP have actually pulled the rug from under our feet, presumably by negotiating with some national terms and conditions committee to stuff us on the forms. They wrote: “Under a longstanding agreement, hospitals are obliged to provide factual reports on request, within laid down timescales (10 days) and free of charge to the Department for Work and Pensions, the Veterans Agency and contractors working on their behalf. I am afraid your hospital is very slow to respond to requests for information with several consultants refusing to complete the reports. This in turn delays decisions on entitlement and can cause distress to our customers. I would be grateful therefore if you could remind your staff of the longstanding agreement and the importance of responding to requests timeously.”

Well, I’ll be stuffed if I am going to slog my guts over a stupid form, with questions I can’t answer, simply to release the DWP from their responsibility for examining their own ‘customers’, and allowing them to tell the very same ‘customers’ that it’s all my fault that their benefits got cut - which is the entire reason for these damn forms turning up on your desk.

I plan a campaign of disobedience with these forms, and would ask all readers to do the same - there are several ways to approach them:

1. Put the form through a shredder, place the bits in the Reply Paid envelope and send it back to the DWP - they will never know who it came from without a lot of time and sellotape

2. Write in every box - “unable to assess, needs DWP medical examination” - that will soon cost them a fortune and clog up the in trays of the doctors who are actually meant to be making these assessments

3. Write on the form – “this is one of the most disabled patients I have ever met, and I recommend that they get full Incapacity Benefit, Mobility Allowance, a War Pension, a full refit of their bathroom and kitchen - and chuck in an Orange Parking Badge for good measure.” You’ll get a really grateful patient, and know that the stupid form cost the taxpayer a good few thousand a month.  

All of these should be guaranteed to stop the DWP holding us to our longstanding agreement, and we can get on with our job of ‘timeously’ (?!) looking after patients.