Bunhill: Good health - a clean bill for pounds 36

ONCE upon a time, on a high street in Leeds, I was asked to participate in a promotion for a sparkling wine - take a sip from three cups and guess which one was Babycham, and then tell the cameras what sort of image the brand conjured up. I didn't give an honest answer but, in spite of that, I don't think my comments were used.

Last week, a similar type of promotion took place and this time the brand was a doctors' surgery. Admittedly, the offer was slightly different - you weren't given three check-ups and then asked to say which had been done by a doctor - but there was a freebie: Londoners were offered free blood checks if they got on board a mobile surgery travelling up and down Oxford Street on a double-decker bus. Incentives to jump off while the bus was moving were few and far between.

The initiative came from the healthcare company Sinclair Montrose, promoting its fifth Medicentre GP surgery, which has just opened on Oxford Street. But although it took its service to the people last week, the Medicentre is not for the masses: a basic consultation will cost you pounds 36 and screenings range from pounds 40 to pounds 250 for the "platinum" screening.

So can GP surgeries be packaged just like any other product? Apparently so, because Sinclair Montrose has big plans: over the next year it aims to add 15 more Medicentres to a chain that includes surgeries at four London railway stations and a Sainsbury's store in Sheffield.

Where Sinclair Montrose scores is convenience, because instead of waiting weeks for an appointment, or taking your chances in a doctor's waiting room, you can pop into a Medicentre at any time from 7am to 9pm during the week, either on your way to work or while you're doing the shopping. The usual arguments will apply about whether this is a useful antidote to an over-stretched system, or a sticking plaster that hides the deeper problems in the health service. However, the British Medical Association's main anxiety is not that the NHS is being undermined but that continuity of care is endangered because the patient's case notes may not be updated.

Kate Bleasdale, chief executive of Sinclair Montrose, answers this concern by explaining that people often need treatment outside normal surgery hours, when case histories and past prescriptions are not available. Anyway, she adds, 50 per cent of Medicentre customers don't want the notes of their visit to be passed back to their local GP.

Because Sinclair Montrose is a pioneer in private surgeries, health insurers have yet to catch up. But as "luck would have it", says Ms Bleasdale, it is launching a policy that will pay GP fees. This will be available from next month and, seeing as nearly all private surgeries are Medicentres, you could say Sinclair Montrose has cornered the market.

The company's financial results for 1997 are due out on Wednesday and should provide some indication of the nation's desire for convenience at a cost. In the meantime, a few hearts will be missing a beat at those companies who depend on patients spending too much time in waiting rooms. Country Life, Harpers & Queen, the Tatler - you have been warned.

Woman of our times

AFTER a week in which the Savoy Hotel fell into foreign hands, joining Cunard and Rolls-Royce in an exodus of British household names, it is a good time to honour the woman who planted a Union Jack for business on continental soil.

Griselda Mae Ffinche was born into wealthy family in 1880 but her father, a merchant banker, made no financial provision for his daughter in the hope that she would develop entrepreneurial instincts of her own. This she did, with interest.

Her first step into commerce came in the City of London at the turn of the century - a time when "crossing boys" used to sweep the streets clean of horse dung. Partly because she saw an opportunity, and partly because she disapproved of child labour, Ffinche devised a horse-pulled scoop that would collect dung as it moved and then, by use of a pully, lift the excrement into a cart. The "catch" would then be sold to farmers for manure.

The service took off and, flush with money, Ffinche holidayed in France. There she discovered that the streets were still cleaned in the old, primitive way and used the proceeds of her London operation to acquire France's leading cleaning firm, L'Agents de Nettoyage National. Again, the idea was a success and our hero was feted by the French, even acquiring the nickname of Ffinche of Orleans.

Britain was to share in her good fortune because she used the retained profits from her French venture to set up the Ffinche Foundation, a fund designed to back British inventors. Among the innovations that benefited from her patronage were the "Pebble Dasher", an early precursor of Barnes Wallis's Bouncing Bomb, and the "Bangerlite", a grill pan specially built for sausages.

Ultimately Ffinche overreached herself by launching an audacious bid for the French bank Societe Generale, a project that was to end in tears because the British investment bankers of the time did not take female entrepreneurs seriously. Ffinche died a frustrated woman in 1959 but not before she had once again demonstrated her altruism by gifting 500 guineas to a doomed American artist called Nat Tate. Her tombstone bears the epitaph: "Griselda Mae Ffinche - never existed but not forgotten". Happy Easter.