Today there was an investigation of high cost of calls to hospital patients - and I missed it !
Anyone see it and can comment?

Unfortunately broadband has not reached our rural idyll yet
Hence the reason I was hoping for some info.  Thanks anyway though.

Cheers, farci, I had actually read that, already, however.

farci wrote on Jan 18^th, 2006 at 4:40pm:


I expect if his officers were in the habit of mistreating officers in prisons he would have blamed the government for not giving him a big enough budget to hire better qualified officers.  As opposed to it being his fault for not having good enough procedures in place to weed out the bad apples.  Mr Derek Lewis is nothing if not economical with the truth.

Obviously it would be most fair for the patients and not the relatives to pay the extra cost of the calls but isn't £3.50 a day enough to be able to afford to provide normal priced incoming phone calls???!!!!   A starting point would be for Patientline to offer a geographic phone number if you pay the £3.50 a day but an 070 if you don't subscribe but still want phone calls.  Although I really don't see why the tv service should cost more than £1.50 a day if it is to be affordable to most people.  If Patientline can't make a profit for 8 years they are clearly a very inefficient operator in terms of the supply cost of the bedside terminals and/or also possibly falsely economising by not buying the best equipment of Bosch/Miele reliability standards that needs little or no maintenance.

By the way bigjohn there is already a thread running on Patientline and you really should have made this post there.  I hope that Dave will merge this thread with the Patientline thread in due course.

firestop wrote on Jan 21^st, 2006 at 8:27am:


Ah yes.  My apologies to bigjohn it would seem.

I know the business about not starting new threads on the same topic can sometimes be difficult to comply with firestop but in this case the existing Patientline thread was really rather prominent.

Quote:

The rates shown on the Patientline page are correct. 49p/39p/39p. The rates you quote appear to be applicable to a discount option such as BT Together.

bbb_uk wrote on Dec 31^st, 2005 at 12:19pm:

With Patientline it's the other way round - you get the hour of free TV only if you're not paying for TV.


Quote:
It actually costs a lot less than £100 per month for TV.

pw4 wrote on Jan 21^st, 2006 at 10:10pm:


BT Together rates are what people on BT Option 1, Option 2 and Option 3 pay to call Patientline.  That is the rate charged on over 95% of BT residential lines and for 99%+ of Patientline calls by call volume given that BT Light User Scheme and BT In Contact Plus customers (the only BT residential customers not to pay BT Together rates and to pay the full rates for Patientline calls) are understandably likely to be very reluctant indeed to make a call costing nearly £30 an hour.  Also please tell me where I can find the full BT rates outside BT Together as BT don't seem very keen to publicise those rates on their website?

Still if you want to argue that most BT customers are paying a rate that is higher than they actually are paying to call Patientline that's clearly up to you.  If I really had to call someone on Patientline I would use www.18866.co.uk at 15p per minute at all times on my BT line.  And you don't mention BT Payphone rates to pn3 of £1 a minute versus less than 2p per minute for an 01 or 02 geographic phone number.  Most mobiles also seem to charge £1 a minute at all times to call Patientline.

By the way why do you irritatingly start a new message for every point you wish to make.  That makes it rather obvious you are in fact the same person as the other hospital radio chappie with a different user name who said he was quitting the forum.  Rather than lose face you have instead dreamed up a new user name.