BRITAIN. Chaitanya Patel, the Caring Tycoon

The caring tycoon Chaitanya Patel has been many things in his time: child of a poor immigrant family, NHS doctor, City hotshot, Tony Blair's health guru - and multimillionaire owner of the Priory group of rehab clinics, writes Stuart Jeffries LONDON (The Guardian), August 8, 2005: As I leave Dr Chaitanya Patel's office at the Surrey headquarters of his Priory Group, he hands me three self-help books: Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist, Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet and, unexpectedly, Who Moved My Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life by Spencer Johnson MD. Each one, Patel says, has helped him in his life - to get what he wants, to focus on what is important, to realise that the journey is the destination. They may also help me. Journalist, the gesture says, heal thyself! This is very kind of Dr Patel, who has been a suave and charming interviewee, but it is perhaps surprising that he doesn't add to my pile Charles Handy's The New Alchemists: How Visionary People Make Something out of Nothing. For Chai Patel made a fortune from seeing what others did not - that there was money to be made from Britain's National Health Service. He certainly started off with next to nothing. As a boy in India he, his sister and parents lived in two rooms. "We had so little. But I don't remember it as a bad time because everybody was in the same state." Now, though, by dint of his alchemical business savvy, he has a very great deal. Last month the Priory Group of rehabilitation clinics, of which he is the chief executive, was sold to the Dutch bank ABN Amro for £875m, a sale that made him £10m. Patel's would seem to be a get-rich-quick story of an Indian who came to Britain aged 15 with more get-up-and-go than his white contemporaries, quickly achieved academic success and medical expertise, reinvented himself as a businessman and never looked back. He has certainly made plenty of money from celebrities ready to stump up £600-plus a night for therapeutic rehab at the Priory's sumptuous pile in Roehampton, south London. But if there is something in this story, it is by no means the whole truth - for a start, he is not Indian, but African, born to Indian parents in Uganda in 1954. He is now genteelly English, a man who, when he isn't working on his golf handicap or listening to opera, is donating some of that fortune to his chums in the Labour party or doing his public duty by working on the government's national Older People's Taskforce or advising Help the Aged. Patel may be an archetypal self-made New Labour millionaire, but he says it isn't money that spurs him on. As he tells it, this former NHS doctor, sickened by underfunding and poor quality of care, decided that the only way to change this was by bringing private finances to help improve public health. He is now bullishly in favour of the Labour policies on foundation hospitals and customer model extending across all healthcare. "Medicine should always be about bringing hope, and too often the NHS didn't do that. If you don't feel hopeful, it's less likely you will get better." He was inspired to all this by his experiences in Uganda in the late 60s. "I wanted to be a doctor since I was five, mostly because of my uncle. I wanted his specs, his car, and I wanted to be a doctor like him. What I wanted to do from the start was get into patient-centred medicine." The Patels left Uganda for India before Idi Amin expelled the country's Asians. "[My father] had left in '52 and went back in '65. The world had changed. He couldn't do business in India. He was out of work for three years." So in 1968 Patel senior headed for England and seduced the rest of the family by sending them back British sweets and glowing reports of western civilisation. "He wrote that it was a marvellously polite place, clean, free of corruption, where people stood in orderly queues. You may not remember that." When the rest of the family arrived in London, they too were impressed. Fifteen-year-old Chai had arrived on his third continent. "I went to Elliott school in Putney, the biggest comprehensive. My parents were amazed it was free and were struck by this big, shiny new building. We had been schooled in private schools in India, which sounds grand but it wasn't. Elliott seemed wonderful." He was teased for turning up in a tie to a school that had no uniform. "I upset my dad by wanting to grow my hair long and to wear loons and T-shirts to school." He went on to study medicine at Southampton university, chosen "because the training was patient-centred. I never wanted to be great in biochemistry or a super-skilled guy. That wasn't what it was about for me." He specialised in gastroenterology "because that was a field where I could make a difference". Having delighted his postmaster father and shop-worker mother with membership of the Royal College of Physicians ("there are lots of doctors in India, but the cachet of the MRCP there is massive"), Chai went to work for the NHS in Oxford and Bournemouth. "This was the beginnings of the Thatcher era, '79 to '85. It was terribly underfunded and staff were ground down. We kept running out of beds and I asked myself, how can we be running out of resources? In Bournemouth I saw geriatric services face on and they weren't good enough. If they weren't good enough for my mother, why should they be good enough for anybody else's?" He also noted that his bosses were often supplementing their incomes through private practice. "That didn't feel right to me. I had centre-left leanings, and no problems with people making money, but I felt that everybody should have access to good services. I had choices: I could either continue, get burned out like my friends and fairly cynical. Or get out." He got out. In 1985, aged 28, he resigned from the NHS, spending some time as a research fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford, reflecting on what had gone wrong with NHS care for the elderly. It was there that he began to envisage replacing the traditional healthcare model with a commercial one that guaranteed accountability to the patient. "The idea was that if I set something up on my own, I could run it better. I would try to run it in a person-centred way but make it financially successful." He decided that in order to do this properly, he must first learn about finance by working in the City, something that disgusted his parents and his first wife, a GP whom he had met at Southampton. After training with Merrill Lynch in the US he landed a job with Lehman Brothers. It made him a lot of money, much of which he sought to invest in a healthcare business. "I could have stayed as a banker, but I didn't find it fulfilling. It was hollow." In 1988, he set up Court Cavendish, which specialised in nursing homes for the elderly. It grew rapidly; after five years it was floated on the stock exchange and became the fifth-largest British company of its kind. In the mid-1990s, it was valued at £67m and, after a merger, became known as Care First. He was ousted from this group by shareholders, but was soon back in private healthcare, taking over the Westminster Healthcare Group in 1999 in a deal worth approximately £350m. The following year Westminster bought up the Priory Group for £96m. In 2002, Patel sold off his old people's homes and led a buyout of the Priory Group with City firm Doughty Hanson for £295m. He seemed to have an unerringly golden touch - conservative estimates now put his personal wealth at £25m. It was around this time that Patel crept into the public consciousness as Tony Blair's favourite health guru and adviser to former health secretary Alan Milburn. Indeed, he talks glowingly of his involvement with New Labour's health reforms, seeing his values shared by it. But Patel is most famous for owning the Priory, the gaudy jewel in his private healthcare crown that periodically plays host to the likes of Babyshambles' Pete Doherty, celeb mag hag Kerry Katona, entertainer Michael Barrymore and the Marquess of Blandford. In fact, the Priory Group has 14 other sites around the country, often supplying care to the NHS that it cannot always provide itself. Alongside the celebrity clients is an MoD contract to care for soldiers with psychological problems. Does he resent the lurid way the Priory is written about? "No. The reason I don't mind is that it de-stigmatises mental health. It makes people say, 'If it's OK for Kate Moss, it's OK for me.' " Perhaps; but aren't the services the Priory provides beyond the reach of most people? "I get really upset when people describe it as expensive. Nowadays a hotel costs £100-£120 a night and for that you only get breakfast. At the Priory, for £400-plus a day, you get daily therapy programmes that last up to eight hours, nursing, doctors." He says he is proud of the work the group's 6,000 professionals do, claiming that often their expertise feeds helpfully back into NHS mental healthcare. Patel contends that mental health is one of Britain's biggest sources of misery: a third of all families are affected by mental illness. So how do we tackle the problem? "My view is, why do we have a certain percentage of GDP on mental health? Why don't we attract private capital into this space?" How would that help? "When you create choice and contestability, you become accountable. Otherwise a certain degree of sclerosis sets in. But you do need regulation to create a balance." In this, he is on the same page as the government who, from the end of 2005, will allow patients to choose from up to five hospitals, at least one of which will be in the private sector. (Not that this model of choice is exciting the public. Last week a Which? survey found that 89% of respondents put a good local hospital at the head of their choices.) There have been questions about the quality of the services Patel supplies. For the past three years his life has been blighted by allegations of professional misconduct by the General Medical Council. They claimed that at Lynde House, an old people's home in Twickenham owned by Westminster Healthcare, patients were neglected. Last month, Patel was cleared when the GMC conceded there was insufficient evidence to prosecute. He is still angry about the way he was treated. "I have no problem being accountable, but it became political. I was targeted because a lot of people on the GMC believed the private sector should not be involved in these services. But there were eight layers of professionals between the patients and me." In general he says of the geriatric services he provides, "We have taken something which is essentially a Cinderella service and made it something better." But something went wrong at Lynde House? "Yes, it's all about quality of service and accountability. But I didn't know about what had gone wrong and it was assumed that because I didn't know, I didn't care. But when I found out there was an issue I immediately got involved." And it is not only British health provision, he believes, that can benefit from private investment. Patel has recently invested in a conservation project in South Africa. Wildlife has been brought back to 250 acres of poor farmland in an area that was once wilderness. Safari operators have brought tourism to the area and, he says, 1,000 tourist hospitality jobs. "When I turned 50, I realised I wanted to do something like this. Partly because I am an African by birth. But also because I could see how my money could make a difference to people's lives. Making something happen, seeing people flourish, making a difference. That is what the journey is always about for me." THE INDEPENDENT had carried a report by Miles Goslett about Chaitanya Patel on July 10, 2005. Here is an extract: Chaitanya Patel: Golden guru He cures! He scores! At £615 a night and a client list to shame The Ivy , the man behind the Priory is hailed as much as an entrepreneur as a doctor. But is he happy? Well, he's just sold it for a healthy £875m... Dr Chaitanya Patel demonstrated an impressive ability to cut a deal early in life. On his first day at comprehensive school in Putney, London, the 15-year-old from East Africa found himself sitting next to a prominent member of a gang of skinheads. Characteristically quick off the mark, Patel capitalised on his natural strength - numbers - to ensure he was on the right side of his foe. "He couldn't do his maths and I did it for him," Patel recalled. "After that we had a mutual insurance contract." More than three decades later, such instinctive canniness has not deserted the 50-year-old doctor-cum-businessman. Last Tuesday, the Priory Group of rehabilitation clinics, of which Patel is chief executive, was sold to the Dutch bank ABN Amro for £875m. It is thought the sale made him a personal fortune of £10m, as well as increasing his share options in the group to a value approaching £40m.