Dr Krishna Korlipara honoured for his contribution to health

Dr Krishna Korlipara, aged 79, is being celebrated as a ‘migrant architect’ of the NHS by the Royal College of General Practitioners at an exhibition in London.

Throughout his life Dr Korlipara has shown again and again he is reluctant to sit on his laurels and by his own admission has ‘grand ideas’.

Dr Korlipara travelled to London from his home near Hyderabad in South India in 1964 and bold as brass walked into the office of the director of Guy’s Hospital in Southwark, London and asked for a job.

He described the meeting: “I never understood the meaning of fear, I walked in and said, ‘I’m expecting your help’.

“Then I gave him an unsolicited lecture on the history of India and how it was ruled by British people.

“He must have thought ‘here’s a strange fellow’.”

Dr Korlipara reflected on his first job interview and described himself as ‘uncouth in terms of my manners’ but nevertheless it worked.

A phone call and an explanation of how to use the Tube later, Dr Korlipara found himself with a job at the Royal Free Hospital under Dame Sheila Sherlock, a leading liver expert who was the UK’s first female Professor of Medicine.

However, a month later he found himself on a ship from Liverpool on a two-week voyage back to India, he was homesick.

Dr Korlipara said: “My father said, ‘you fool! I sent you there to study’ and after six months I came back better prepared and never looked back.”

With the help of the Indian YMCA in London he secured a job in Bristol.

He said: “I must have impressed them, they put me up for nine months and everything was provided.”

From there he moved to Wigan but on arriving at the train station he found he had no idea where to go next.

Dr Korlipara said: “I asked a lady ‘could you tell me where the Royal Albert Edward Infirmary is?’ And she walked me right through Wigan to the infirmary.

“It’s always stood out in my mind how friendly and helpful the people were.”

Dr Korlipara’s career took him to Sheffield and then to Bolton in 1968 as the senior house officer for the elderly at Royal Bolton.

It was here there was a turning point for Dr Korlipara, he failed the viva for his consultancy exams.

He said: “I failed in the oral examinations because they were asking questions which I thought were not relevant and I’m very intolerant of anything I don’t approve of. I must have spoken arrogantly and I never sat the exam again.”

Here he considered a job in America, even going as far as to get an interview at Mount Sinai hospital in New York.

However, he decided against going and opted to become a general practitioner in Bolton.

He started at Dr Rab Choudary’s practice in Chorley New Road but left later that same year in 1970 and bought a shop further down the road and set up the Community Practice.

New Year’s Eve 1976 one of Dr Korlipara’s proudest achievements came to fruition – a GP Co-operative — Bolton District Medical Services.

That year he had gathered the doctors of Bolton together and argued the case for a locally organised out-of-hours doctors service, run by the town’s GPs.

He wanted to wrest control of the out-of-hours services away from privately owned and remotely-operated companies, like On Call Ltd, which ran Bolton’s out-of-hours doctors from St Helen’s.

His peers agreed and the country’s first GP co-operative was born. A year to the day later Wigan’s GPs followed suit.

Four years later there were 330 GP co-operatives across the country and the National Association of GP Co-operatives was set up.

He did not stop there though. He said: “I always had grand ideas and I thought I should build a proper medical centre, like a community hospital.

“So it became the first purpose built medical centre by a doctor in Bolton.”

That medical centre, Pike View, opened in Albert Street, Bolton on July 2, 1983.

The next year he was elected to the General Medical Council for the first time and held his position, being reelected five times, until 2008, making him the longest serving.

Wigan Rotary after retirement.