Hospitals are dangerous. You have only to glance at the newspapers to convince yourself that if you set foot in one you’re going to be killed by a sleep-deprived junior doctor. Even if you survive, then you’re certain to catch a dose of MRSA as a souvenir. Professor Sherwood Burge, a consultant at Heartlands Hospital in Birmingham, admitted this week that the hospital was “not a terribly safe place to be”.

Which is why I do my best to keep my patients away from them, sending them there for X-rays and scans only when there’s a real chance that the results might influence their treatment.

All their blood samples for routine tests are done at my surgery rather than at the pathology lab and I even entice hospital specialists to see outpatients at my place rather than theirs.

Not only do I keep my patients away, you won’t catch me showing my face there unless I absolutely have to. I can’t stand the long soulless corridors full of sad-looking people who only want to talk about their operation.

When I do pitch up on their premises, usually to endure a three-hour committee meeting about infection control in a windowless room, I take a packed lunch. There’s something about hospital food that makes you wonder what happens to all the bits they cut out in the operating theatre down the corridor.

In fact, there’s only one medical environment that’s more fraught with danger than a hospital ward; a place where I will venture only as a last resort: the patient’s home.

“Ah,” you say, “GPs don’t do home visits any more.”

So how do I know what the inside of a patient’s house is like? I do try to avoid them but sometimes circumstances conspire against me.

Picture this: I’m on my way to the surgery when a call comes through requesting an urgent home visit for a 22-year-old male who is “vomiting and dehydrating” and who lives a minute’s drive away. Two things are virtually certain: first, the sufferer will be a hungover piss artist who reheated some pizza last night and he won’t be expecting anything more than a routine “take some aspririn and see me in a day or two” phone call. And secondly, I’m not about to bump up my mobile bill if I can give him a “Gastro-enteritis for Dummies” tutorial face to face.

Besides, until you’ve felt the soles of your shoes stick to the hallway floor, skirted around piles of pet droppings on the stairs and pulled a curtain rail off the bedroom wall to allow sunlight to enter for the first time in years, you’ve no business calling yourself a front-line medic.

Somewhere in the gloom under a duvet held together only by the crusty stains of bodily fluids, prostrate among the beer cans, ashtrays and black T-shirts lurks a sickly Goth with a stiff neck and an aversion to light, unusual even for him. Alongside, watching with a quizzical eye, lies an iguana. This is my first case of reptile-poo-transmitted salmonella meningitis. Which shows that, if you must scrape your dinner off the kitchen floor, you’d better clean it first.

Dr Copperfield is an Essex GP. He also writes for Doctor magazine