Patientline backs down on price rises Patientline, the beleaguered monopoly supplier of communication services to UK hospital patients, has dropped its prices back to the pre-April level of 10 pence a minute for outgoing calls: incoming calls remain at the outrageous 49p a minute. The company paid a fortune to fit specially-manufactured equipment beside hospital …
What's really outrageous is that they are allowed to charge *anything at all* above and beyond the usual amount for making and receiving telephone calls. Remember, this is happening in NHS hospitals, not private ones where everything can be claimed back on insurance. (And, conveniently, medical equipment is subject to malfunction when exposed to mobile phones; so people in hospital really don't have a choice. One presumes that this situation will change as equipment which predated the EMC directive is gradually replaced.)
Next thing you know, they'll be charging for the toilets!
Even Thatcher would never have let this sort of thing happen.
If the call charges were anywhere near usual telecom prices I'd have used it, but rather put up with dodgy mobile connections than pay 50p per min to find out how my wife was after having a baby...there are BT phones in the hallways at 20p ..and that was 7 years ago when i wasnt earning 30K
Rip off will always fail, ask BSB (pre sky), betamax and any number of uk companies (car industry) who thought we'd pay extra premiums for naff stuff just cos we're british.
Patientline has always been a joke, too expensive, too much hassle for patients to get cards and causes no end of issues for staff. Let em lose the system or the NHS to buy it dirt cheap and then run it competitively and they'll make money.
"And, conveniently, medical equipment is subject to malfunction when exposed to mobile phones; so people in hospital really don't have a choice." - You really believe that do you? It's complete rubbish, only reason phones are banned (well for the public anyway) is that they are incredibly annoying ringing all the time as people have no bloody manners when using mobiles so cause untold pain to people who don't need any more.
Virtually all Doctors in hospitals and many of the staff use mobiles as hospital pagers are in short supply and stupidly expensive, if they were a problem for equipment do you think a doctor would make his job harder?
After numerous stays in hospital over the last two years, I must admit I have played with their equipment a bit.
The novelty of incoming calls to the bedside wore off rather tartly when the bill for over £80 came in. It actually took us a little time to work out what the huge call charges were!
The TV picture is risible with nasty analogue colour distortions, the choice is poor, less channels than Freeview. Oh, and the sodding thing turns itself on at 8:00 every morning, even if it was manually turned off!
Whatever internet browser they are using, and I suspect it is some IE derivative because the terminals run Windows CE, cannot cope with the type of pages thrown out by many modern sites. designMode in particular seems to cause the browser to croak. Not funny when you're being charged stupid amounts of money per minute. (Yes the terminals reboot regularly, sigh.)
Oh, also the nasty minded sods have blocked the loophole where patients would give smart cards with credit left to other patients when they left the hospital. Now they are locked to the terminal they are first inserted into.
Nasty, small minded, greedy, exploitative people. I hope they DO go bust. Soon.
Colour me unsurprised that a dot com startup has failed. Some investment banker is getting his fingers burnt because they didn't realistically assess the market and paid too much up front. Aw. Diddums. Hopefully the hospitals will be able to buy the equipment at pence in the pound when PatientLine goes under and then run it on a non-profit basis.
Then again, this is the NHS and comms tech we're talking about.
The only NHS involvement here is to sign up with Patientline; thereafter it's Patientline's technology and money. NPfIT etc is a different matter altogether, although Patientline probably marketed their boxes to hospitals as being ready for the era of "electronic patient records" etc.
I suspect part of the current Patientline problem is that although Patientline may have been first and most famous and they still have local monopolies, there is at least one other company now trading in this sector, with prices marginally more sensible, and sensible hospitals are avoiding Patientline like the plague (to coin a phrase).
I can't personally comment on the quality of Premier Bedside's service because I left hospital before it went live on the ward I was on, but my fellow patients didn't really appreciate being shunted from ward to ward while the sets were installed. The hospital administrator lady was happy the kit was going in, but whether the infection control folks would have been so happy is tbc... There are some viruses Norton can handle, and some viruses it can't.
from a captive audience, Despicable.
Patientline, should be a non-profit making entity. (although making enough profit to pay wages and re-invest). And so should the water, electricity and gas supplies. The vast majority of this countrys' populace do not have a choice on whether to use supplied water, gas and electricity. Thus are forced to pay whatever the suppliers demand. With profits for shareholders and the directors of these companies running into hundreds of millions, we are being ripped off.
I wonder what the profit margins for Patientline are. They say they have to recuperate their investment. I say they went into this with eyes wide open expecting to be able to charge enough to pay for the kit and the board of directors' Bentleys and Ferraris within the first year or two, by ripping of the sick and infirm. What b4574rds! Just a little worse than those running the water, electricity and gas companies.
I spent several months with my terminally ill father in and out of hospital in 2005 and the PatientLine system was universally despised. Trying to call in from the USA was an exercise in futility, especially if you wanted to use low cost calling plans.
The equipment was shoddy and the staff were trained to spot mobile phone users from 100 yards to make sure they weren't used to circumvent this abomination.
We called the system: "PatientCrime".
Simon
Back in the mists of time I was briefly involved with examining the possibility of using the Patientline hardware to access patient records and research information (e.g. Medline) at the bedside. Aside from the inevitable security nightmare, this could have been a useful secondary application for the system. Sadly, it was an idea before its time.
More recently, I was working at a Hospital Radio station during the implementation of Patientline. Hospital Radio stations should be added to the system for free, but Patientline wanted to charge us for the cost of running the audio feed between our studio and their equipment. The installation was delayed again and again, with our Chairman constantly having to chase the on-site engineer for information.
The biggest problem we found with Patientline itself is that you have to register with them in order to receive any service at all, even radio (which is free).
Now think of the typical elderly patient living alone. Not many of them want to provide the nice man/lady on the registration line with their home address in case the information leaks out and they get burgled.
For others, it is just "too complicated". Luckily, the station I worked at was able to keep the old system in place, so most patients continue to use that in preference as registration is not required and it's much easier to use :-)
I find this whole argument deeply aborent about "recovering the investment" ! Whose stupid idea it was to put in such expensive (and useless) equipment to fleece patients? The coke snorting bosses at both the NHS and Patientline,I guess.
With the billions being spent by NHS, surely bedside phone/TV/Radio as a freeby or complimentary for patients would be a very welcome investment of resources and "receovery of investment" would not be an issue.
Hey, it would also be a big propoganda coup for NHS bosses, being the envy of the world, for providing free or cheap phone/tv and radio packages for patients!! Imagine the possibilities then!
Patientline ? More like Patientfine!
In Australia hospitals have their own suppliers. My mother has been in one hospital much of this year with Cancer. They charge her 50c to dial out, and we pay 25c (or the normal local call rate) to dial in. These are un-timed. These are about 20p and 10p respectively. They do need to register for the phone service which is about $2-3 per day for short stays (or 1 pound) from memory. But if you are a pensioner then the phone service has no per-day charges.
And they are not banning mobile phones either in the hospital, apart from a few minor areas. Even with these charges it is amazing to see how many oncology paitients have mobiles. Just makes things easier for them
Looking at their annual report, the chairman's also deputy chairman of iSoft.
Not that I'm suggesting there's a link, of course.
On a broader note, this strikes me as a classic case of a good idea overgilded. PL's figures show that each bedside unit's cost them about £2k (that's not just the unit, but installation, etc.); they were overspecified for the job in hand, partly as a result of unfulfilled expectations surrounding things like electronic delivery of patient records, and 25% of them are now in need of replacement.
A business which just provided phones could have done so at a small fraction of the cost, and would probably have a very different balance sheet by now.
Hindsight - it's a marvellous thing.
--Dave
The real reason why mobile phones are usually banned in hospitals is because it's written into the Patientline contract. Nothing to do with affecting equipment but everything to do with maintaining a captive audience. Of course the full contract is commercially confidential so people can't see all the terms.
After ending up in hospital myself (thankfully only for an hour or so, so I didn't have to stay overnight), and wanting to keep in touch with relatives who were in for a few weeks I just hope Patientline do go bust and take their overpriced 070x phone numbers with them. They were actually reprimanded by Ofcom for misusing these numbers: http://www.ofcom.org.uk/bulletins/comp_bull_index/comp_bull_ccases/closed_all/cw_804/
"Even Thatcher would never have let this sort of thing happen."
That statement really is a sign of the times. If patientline had been around in the eighties, there'd have been a whole tabloid entirely devoted to the moral outrage generated (OK, not from the Murdoch stable) and an endless stream of Spitting Image skits.
Perhaps patientline can pull themselves back from the brink by taking over the national blood bank and flogging it at market rates to the highest bidder; they certainly have substantial experience of working at those depths of immorality.
You seem to have missed the point I was making.
It's a fact that older electronic equipment *can* be affected my mobile phones. The purpose of the EMC directive was a two-pronged attack, limiting the amount of electrical interference that could be generated by appliances and at the same time requiring appliances to be made less susceptible to electrical interference.
If *all* the kit installed around you bears a legitimate CE mark, and anything without the mark cannot fail in a dangerous way, then there's no good reason not to use a mobile phone around it. As older equipment is being replaced, the electrical interference excuse is wearing thinner and thinner -- soon it will be unusable.
Making money out of NHS patients is beneath immoral.
is too kind a word to be used here.
There are three important indicators of the nation's morality.
The First is Patientline. They are the 'Thenadiers' of Les Miserables. If it were possible, they'd charge the dead as they lie in their hospital beds. They lie in public ... a spokes'person' said on radio that pre Patientline the ill had to leave the wards to 'phone or just lie there unable to call. Lies! A public telephone was available on a trolley in wards. It could be wheeled to the patient's bedside. There are few words to describe the theiving monsters who thought up and supply this wicked system which preys on the sick and their carers.
The Second is the 'Business' Management of Hospitals. They have such a lack of moral courage they hide behind funding priorities in order to get revenue from the sick in their care and their families and friends. Car Park charges, phone charges ... nothing is beyond their grasping, greedy and immoral ways. Amazingly, money can be found for new atriums and shopping malls in hospitals!
The Third is, of course, the Government. The shameful, Stalinist bunch of amateurs who currently inhabit the nest are happy to see these revenue raisers and yet they mortgage future generations with substandand PFI (not shown on the books) projects and IT systems which, if it were truly a business, would result in several 'Golden Kicks-up-Arses".
Patientline? I fart in their general direction and hope their directors are bankrupted and gaoled!
Just picking up on a couple of comments
Missed Opportunity
By Andy T*****
Posted Tuesday 7th August 2007 18:07 GMT
Andy wrote " The biggest problem we found with Patientline itself is that you have to register with them in order to receive any service at all, even radio (which is free). Now think of the typical elderly patient living alone. Not many of them want to provide the nice man/lady on the registration line with their home address in case the information leaks out and they get burgled. "
My reply
Although Patients do have to register, the Patient does not have to give any address details; they can also ask for their bedside telephone number to be restricted and not given out, so if a caller was to ring through to the operator requesting the bedside telephone number it would be withheld.
Another point about mobile phones... "The Pateintline phone rings with the same tone.. how would you feel if you was ill in bed and you had several mobile phones going off with different ringtones day and night; then generally the reception for mobile phones; in a ward it is generally not too good, so the person using the phone often starts to raise there voice, louder and louder !!!! just an observation.. What can cause a problem is many Patient's do take mobile phones in; most have camera's; there was an incident at a Hospital where a member of staff took a picture of a female patients genatials with his mobile phone whilst she was still recovering from the anesthetic; he was convicted of voyeurism then sacked. This opens up many implications.
Further Patients that generally take in mobile phones also take phone chargers; which they just plug in next to their bed; Any electrical item that is plugged into the Hospital Mains must be "PAT" "Portable Appliance Testing" Now I have seen the state of some mobile phone chargers; from the wires showing through, wires snapped then twisted together to the Plastic Plug housing being sellotaped together to a charger with the top half of the plastic housing missing showing the transformer and that's the dangerous part of the charger. So really before plugging into the mains, it would require the Hospital electricians to carry out the testing for every charger. They are generally busy all the time with more important things or would the patients be happy to pay to have their electrical equipment tested. !! This also goes for shavers, TV's, games machine's etc.
I know there are many arguments for and against..
The above comments are my own and not expressed or implied by any other persons or business.
Dave.
( don't have a pop at me for my grammar and spelling; currently on pretty strong Pain Killers )
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