Paul Dolan was on his very first day in his “dream job” as chief executive of 76,000-home housing association Riverside last May when his phone kept ringing.

“I was out doing the meeting and greeting, out and about with the direct labour organisation [staff] and the management team when this number kept coming through on my phone”, he explains. “I ignored it once and then twice. It was a number I didn’t recognise.”

When Dolan eventually felt able to take the call, it was to receive some very concerning news. It was the hospital, phoning about the results of a capsule colonoscopy test he had carried out the day before.

“They said, ‘we’ve found an abnormality, we think you need a full colonoscopy’,” Dolan explains. A couple of weeks later he was in hospital looking at images of the interior of his colon on the monitor.