Hospital charges for TV and Phone

[Salu]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6524545.stm

Our Trust has this installed and all I ever hear are complaints about it. About extortionate charges mostly and complaints about having to pay to watch TV.

Anyone else have experience of them? Have you stayed in hospital and have used them?

What do you think ought to happen when in hospital though? Free TV & low call charges? Use your own mobiles?

Actually mobiles don't really have as much effect on hospital equipment as you may expect. Sure some things are effected and some fire alarms but not to the point that you need to turn your phone off whenever you are in the vicinity of a hospital. In fact you have to be within 1 metre of the device that a mobile may effect for any effect to be noticed.

[Stuart C]

Regarding TV, well, the hospital could allow patients to bring in their own TVs which would then be Tested (in according with the various electrical safety regulations) and the patient then allowed to watch TV free.

Regarding the Phone, they should go back to the old pay phone on a trolley, or allow mobiles.

Yes, I do think the systems a lot of hospitals have installed (my local included) are a rip off.

IIRC, when my mother was in hospital, the system cost her £10 every couple of days, and if we dared call her, it cost us 50p a minute.

[Derek S]

Originally Posted by Salu

Anyone else have experience of them? Have you stayed in hospital and have used them?

It always used to be a favourite for customers to call up and query calls as they had some pretty expensive calls on their bill for a strange number. Asking them if they had called someone in hospital recently normally cleared that up.

Originally Posted by Salu

What do you think ought to happen when in hospital though? Free TV & low call charges? Use your own mobiles?

Use of your own mobiles and TV/Phone provided by a non-profit organization would be nice.

I don't think it's right that prisoners get cheaper calls than patients in hospital (although shock horror charging prisoners is against their human rights allegedly )

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6519169.stm

Originally Posted by BBC

Richard Davison, an inmate at HMP Elmley, Kent, claims the prices - more than five times the national call box rate - are a breach of human rights.
They claim prisoners currently pay 10p for the first 55 seconds of a call, then 1p per every 5.5 seconds after for local or national calls to landlines.

[punky]

When my dad was in hospital in the US, he could use a mobile from his hospital bed. All the doctors did as well. I asked them about it and they said it was because their equiptment was all digital and not analogue.

He also had this touchscreen monitor on this poseable robotic arm over the bed. It provided very basic TV (shopping channels and The Patient Channel, etc) and radio, however, if you pay $10 a day (upto a maximum of $100), then you get internet access, full cable TV, and a webcam (although it wasn't enabled for some reason). We thought it was pretty reasonable.

When he was in one room that was broken one though, he did full cable TV free.

[Stuart C]

Originally Posted by Gavin

He also had this touchscreen monitor on this poseable robotic arm over the bed. It provided very basic TV (shopping channels and The Patient Channel, etc) and radio, however, if you pay $10 a day (upto a maximum of $100), then you get internet access, full cable TV, and a webcam (although it wasn't enabled for some reason). We thought it was pretty reasonable.

That's similar to the hardware my mum had. The only difference being that she had access to the five terrestrial channels, and a couple of others. Judging by the interferance on all channels, it was an analogue signal (bad quality too), was charged at least £3 a day for it.

Internet access was charged by the minute, and the phone charges (both incoming and outgoing) were horrendous.

[brundles]

There's a very entertaining debate that keeps popping up on BBC News 24 at the moment. They have a PatientLine rep trying to justify the prices. It pretty much boils down to "But we've never made a profit and we need to".

[Stuart C]

Originally Posted by brundles

It pretty much boils down to "But we've never made a profit and we need to".

Sorry (and not having a go at you), but if they aren't making a profit at their prices, then someone is creaming off an awful lot of money.

[brundles]

Their argument is that they've spent millions installing the kit in the first place but not yet made enough to recover the cost.

The woman hasn't provided a better argument yet than "privacy risks in hospitals because of cameras in mobile phones" and "we haven't made any money". Oh, and the other corker: "We think 26p per minute is good value for money when the payphone in the hall has a minimum charge of 40p".

In her defence I think whoever sent her to the BBC studio should be shot. There is just no way to justify the prices they charge - especially when combined with the poor service.

I can't help but think that no-one at PatientLine has considered the possibility that lowering the prices and making less profit per call would actually get them more customers and therefore more overall profit. Now the kit is installed, the running costs are minimal.

[MikeyB]

Oh don't get me started on Patientline.

When my wife was in hospital last year I tried to make a call to her bedside phone.
Dial the number, get's answered by a recorded message telling me all about Patientline, then it tried to put me through, only to find out that she had switched the phone off.
Cunning the recorded message is just over a minute long so you get charged for a full minute before (not) being connected
Don't remember the charges, but to keep you hanging on for over a minute before trying to put you through so they can get a full minutes charge from you is terrible.

Just looked at the Patientline website:
"Calls directly to the patient’s bedside cost 39p per minute off peak and 49p per minute peak"

I contacted them but of course got nowhere

[etccarmageddon]

mobiles are now allowed in hospitals - government guidance has been revised. any hospital that has a 'ban' is going against official policy and just doing it in order to keep within their patienline contract.

for example - wythenshawe hospital has mobile phone masts of various flavours on the roof immediately above the IC unit while at the same time has notices all round the hospital saying mobiles should not be used as they interfer with equipment. bull****.

[c1rcle]

They don't seem to get the fact that if you charge more people are less likely to use the service. Use a mobile instead, they don't affect hospital equipment & never have contrary to what they'd have you believe.

If they really did affect the equipment various mobile companies wouldn't be able to do deals to supply all the doctors & nurses free phones for use inside hospitals would they? or put masts into the actual hospital grounds themselves.

[Ramrod]

Patientline have been ripping patients and their relatives off for years now.
I once phoned their head office to complain about their rip-off prices and they just put the phone down on me!

---------- Post added at 13:53 ---------- Previous post was at 13:49 ----------

Originally Posted by Stuart C

Sorry (and not having a go at you), but if they aren't making a profit at their prices, then someone is creaming off an awful lot of money.

iirc, their equipment and install costs were astronomical (imagine supplying phone/tv/ ?internet to every nhs bed! ) but that just illustrates what a cr*p idea it was in the first place--installing something that is going to have to be charged at rip-off prices in order to just break even...

[jkat]

Originally Posted by Salu

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6524545.stm

Our Trust has this installed and all I ever hear are complaints about it. About extortionate charges mostly and complaints about having to pay to watch TV.

Anyone else have experience of them? Have you stayed in hospital and have used them?

What do you think ought to happen when in hospital though? Free TV & low call charges? Use your own mobiles?

Actually mobiles don't really have as much effect on hospital equipment as you may expect. Sure some things are effected and some fire alarms but not to the point that you need to turn your phone off whenever you are in the vicinity of a hospital. In fact you have to be within 1 metre of the device that a mobile may effect for any effect to be noticed.

yes i have had a very bad experience with these bedsise phone/tv.

i was admitted with a suspect cardiac arrest and spent 5 days in intensive care, on the last evening i was informed at about 12 midnight that i also had suspected liver cancer and transfered to another ward about 1am in the morning.
i was desperate to talk to my wife, there was hardly any staff on duty at that particular time because of a local flu epidemic. a nurse informed me later that the phone is at the entrance of the ward, it turned out to be a phone/tv card machine for patientline and i didnt have any money nor credit card with me. well in the end i was so distressed that about 4am in the morning i packed my bags and walked out of the hospital and hitched a lift home, the police arrived about 1 hour later lol. i can only describe the experience as the worst moment of my life! btw the liver cancer turned out to be gall bladder probs!!

[c1rcle]

If the money grabbing toe rags running the hospitals got it into their thick skulls that hospitals are about treating sick people & caring for those who need it & not about making profits there would be less of a problem, stop buying large rocks for £100,000 & pay doctors & nurses what they deserve too.

[punky]

Originally Posted by Stuart C

Internet access was charged by the minute, and the phone charges (both incoming and outgoing) were horrendous.

Just a couple of things I should add for clarity.

1. Internet access was unmetered
2. Most insurance policies cover X amount of that. If you are in hospital for a year with no insurance, the max you paid for it is $100. Most people would pay a max of $10 (10%). Some would pay $0.
3. It also had Java games built in, but allowed Flash games too. So pretty much worth the $10/day really.
4. Incoming phone charges were free. Dunno how much the outgoging ones are but he was allowed to use his mobile which was unlimited free usage (yes, really).

Originally Posted by Ramrod

iirc, their equipment and install costs were astronomical (imagine supplying phone/tv/ ?internet to every nhs bed! ) but that just illustrates what a cr*p idea it was in the first place--installing something that is going to have to be charged at rip-off prices in order to just break even...

I'm not sure every US hospital has it, but I think they did it with new hospitals instead of doing ti retroactively.

Of course, since the UK government has an official policy of never building another hospital, nor extending them, it would mean we'd never see them here.

In case anyone's interested, its called PatientStation by Pyxis. Here's a press release about it