Bureaucrats are ever on the lookout for new methods with which to bully and intimidate the public, and a friend of mine recently drew my attention to one such new method: the medical questionnaire.

My friend had just done some non-medical consultancy work for the NHS executive in the West Midlands, and was asked by letter whether she would like to join a list of consultants to be considered for future similar work on behalf of the Birmingham Women's Hospital trust. If so, would she fill out a medical questionnaire?

This turned out to be nine pages long, and included such questions as: "Do you wear glasses/contact lenses?" and "Have you suffered any 'funny turns' in the last year?" Needless to say, my friend (who does wear glasses) wondered whether this would count for or against her.

She wrote to the occupational health department to point out that, apart from having grown older by one year, her health was exactly the same as when she started her last work for the executive - when she had not been asked to fill out such a form - and that while she was willing to undergo a medical examination if required, she was not willing to answer intrusive questions that she regarded as irrelevant. She received a reply from an "occupational health adviser", which started with the immortal sentence: "The policy at the Birmingham Women's Hospital is to complete health questionnaires on application of posts."

Needless to say, only incompetents, cowards and people with a guilty conscience write English like this, and my friend replied that the trust was perfectly welcome to fill as many questionnaires as it liked. However, she wanted to know why she was required to fill the form when she had ceased working for the executive only two months previously, and when the consultancy work was only hypothetical in any case.

A reply from the occupational health physician himself was written in the kind of clotted English people write when defending a position not because they are convinced of it but because they are part of an organisation: "My assumption is that the reason you have been sent a questionnaire is that the Women's trust require you to have either an honourary contract or in some other way wish to check your health status prior to your working with the trust, with their staff or on their patients."

He added helpfully that the questionnaire "is agreed as being an appropriate screening questionnaire" (a case of one hand clapping if ever there was one), and concluded: "At present my recommendation would have to be that you are not fit to carry out any work on behalf of the trust until such time as we have received the questionnaire."

It is nice to know, of course, that merely filling in an occupational health questionnaire will bind up wounds and make the lame whole again, thus rendering a person fit for work, but my friend nevertheless replied: "I am interested to know whether it is the trust's policy to require all contractors to complete health questionnaires - for example computer personnel and window cleaners?"

The occupational health physician had also stated in his letter that "the information remains wholly confidential within the occupational health department and is not released to any other party", to which my friend naturally replied by asking what use, then, it could possibly be to the personnel department that was considering her application for employment?

In fact, the assertion that the information was in all circumstances confidential was a bare-faced lie, for at the beginning of the questionnaire we find the following sinister words: "Failure to disclose information fully or accurately may lead to termination of employment." Since it is unlikely that the occupational health department would fire people, it is clear that the information must sometimes be passed to the personnel department, that is to say it is not confidential in the least, and was never intended to be confidential.

Indeed, it seems to me likely that the whole purpose of so detailed a questionnaire is to ensure that every applicant for a job tells at least one lie which might subsequently be used as a reason to dismiss him. It is, in effect, an undated letter of resignation.

Besides, it is characteristic of these days of ideological non-discrimination that in practice the most blatant discrimination is routinely found. (My epileptic patients, for example, cannot find jobs even when their epilepsy is completely irrelevant to the task in hand.) And once a policy is a policy, nothing at all can be done about it. It has become a natural fact, like the climate.

What the public needs, therefore, is a policy policy: non-cooperation with any policy whose sole justification is that it is a policy.