The scandal of moonlighting doctors

On 1 March 2019, managers at Basildon University Hospital needed to find one of their most senior obstetricians — fast. The Care Quality Commission was in the building asking pointed questions about the women’s and children’s department, and Dr Moboladale Ojutiku was supposed to be there. He was not. He was, it later emerged, 40 minutes away at Chartwell Private Hospital, seeing patients on the taxpayers dime. Readers might be shocked, surprised, or even disgusted by this. I’m not. As an A&E consultant, I occupy the relative moral high ground here. Almost nobody moonlights in my specialty: there is very little private emergency medicine in the UK. In my 20-odd years of practice, I’ve never once had to weigh a patient’s care against my own bank balance. But I have spent two decades watching