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This makes the whole scam far, far, far worse than I initially appreciated.  On exactly what basis are mobiles banned in hospitals? Presumably this is done deliberately so as to allow Patientline and their scheming business partners at the NHS to make a fortune out of their patients' phone calls?

No wonder even sleepy Ofcom has been forced into acting on its own rarely used initiative over this one.

Surely there could be an organised mass flouting of the rules by patients at a major hospital at a set time of day with national newspaper journalists invited.  Exactly what could the NHS do about that?  I don't think either taking their patients to court or kicking them out on the street would really go down too well in the national newspapers.

This is one that needs a writeup from the Daily Mirror.  Does anyone have the journalist's name there?  I never got the paper with the article in it and no one ever seems to have put together a press archive of the London bombings 0870 press coverage.

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What a lot of utter old tosh.  The ban on mobile use in aeroplanes is mainly in reality due to fears of terrorist use from what I can gather.  People break the rule on using mobiles on planes on almost every flight on every day of the week (especially by accidentally leaving them switched on in standby in coat pockets) and not one plane seems to have blown up or crashed yet as a result.  If the risk was as bad as claimed the airlines would take the mobiles off customers for the duration of the flight and detach the batteries.

It might well be reasonable to ban mobiles in operating theatres or near an electro magnetic scanners in hospitals but not anywhere else.  It would appear this ban is actually due to scamming advice given by Patientline to make sure they earned their 39p or 49p a minute.  I imagine their bloated chief executive living in his £5 million pound mansion and having lavish private medical insurance as I write.

The sort of thing that I hate about the NHS is that aside from already being ill enough to be in hospital they then try to dehumanise you even further by removing your normal means of contacting the outside world and by treating you like baggage that they can herd around.

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I very much doubt that mobiles are a danger to health in any of these areas.  It is outdated thinking that needs to be addressed at the same time as the Patientline issue.

The two things are directly related as if mobiles are allowed then the Patientline problem becomes a lot less of a major issue.

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It's an outdated ban anyway.  I was in ICU last year (having had a heart operation) and, when my wife phoned to speak to me 7 hours after the operation and 4 hours after I'd been taken off life support, the staff nurse brought me a DECT phone to speak to her!

I had tubes, drips. drains and all sorts entering/sticking out of various parts of my body at the time.

Later that day, I saw my surgeon talking on his cellphone on the other side of ICU - 5 yards from my bed!

It maybe an outdated ban but it wasn't in place for patientline to benefit from it.

I do believe very few (if any) hospital equipment could be suspectable to intereference now but I don't think anyone has said beyond a doubt that it wont cause any intereference with some hospital equipment.  This is probably why they still operate a ban.

Also, DECT phones operate on a lower power consumation and therefore cause hardly any intereference especially on the frequencies they generally operate on.

Mobiles use a lot more more power and it is more possible for these to cause intereference.

My DECT phone doesn't interefere my car stereo (or home HiFi) but all my mobiles I've owned do though.

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I agree they do.

Personally though, I can't see OfCOM doing much except maybe something about having to wait until the end of the recorded message before you can enter the patient line number of whomever you are trying to call.

I have emailed the person who is looking into this from OfCOM about this and the call charges but more importingly they use a personal number but surely that is against regulations as you don't actually speak to the person you are after until the end of recorded speech and that is of course assuming you know their patientline number otherwise you have to wait in a queue (if they are busy) and speak to an operator.

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That's the frequency they can operate at (some also use the 900mhz frequency range that is similar to that of o2 and Voda.

The power consumation is the amount of power needed to communicate with its base station/cell site.

That is why mobiles have an SAR rating but bluetooth and DECT phones dont because they operate on significantly lower power than mobiles and are below the legal requirements that specify you have to publish the SAR rate.

For example, the SAR of a bluetooth device is only around 0.001 watts per kilogram compared to mobiles that have an SAR around 0.83 watts per kilogram.  I'm not sure of the SAR measurement (if one has even been done) on DECT phones.