...

Q468 Charlotte Atkins: You have said here that the installation costs are something up to £2,000. Given the changes in technology, is there the opportunity for these costs to come down? It seems to me that you have got something a bit like a white elephant in many situations because the full range of services which are provided in these units are not being exploited, so people are having to pay the cost of more than actually ringing Australia to access a friend or relative in hospital, and I speak with experience here, having ended up with a charge of £60 when a member of my family used your service. It seems to me that they are paying for something which is not being fully exploited.

Mr Lewis: I think the answer to that is that they are not white elephants by any means. In fact our technology is regarded outside the UK as being leading edge, and hospitals in the United States, for example, are bearing the full capital costs of the magnitude you have just described in order to install these systems because they see a very wide range of benefits from them. In a US hospital there is already television and telephone there and US hospitals are paying up to £2,000 a bed in order to provide devices which will provide the full range of clinical services and other services that I have been talking about.

Q469 Charlotte Atkins: But it is a white elephant if it is not being used. That is the point. It is not a white elephant in the sense that it is being used in other countries, but it is a white elephant if it is not being appropriately used and the full system is not being exploited, which means in fact, as Richard was saying, that patients' friends and relatives, by and large, because they are ringing the hospital and they are the ones that are being charged excessively, are subsidising a system which is not being appropriately used in the NHS.

Mr Lewis: In that sense, I would agree with you. I think the solution to that is to ensure that they are fully used. This investment is now largely a sunk investment; it has been made and the systems are there. The challenge, I think, is to make sure that the full potential of it is used to improve patient care, to generate the sort of cost savings we were talking about, to reduce medical errors and so on, for which there is considerable potential.

Q470 Charlotte Atkins: But the contract was agreed when, in 2000?

Mr Lewis: The contracts were specified in 2000, yes.

Q471 Charlotte Atkins: So presumably technology has now moved on and you presumably have stage two, stage three of your systems which presumably, given that the cost of computers and other technology is coming down, are not as expensive as they were back in 2000?

Mr Lewis: The actual capital cost is very similar. Technology has moved on and it has become slightly more sophisticated but the core costs, which are in designing the physical hardware that goes in at the bedside and all the cabling, have not changed significantly in that period.

Q472 Charlotte Atkins: And as to the people who are being exploited effectively when they ring in, are you doing any sort of analysis about what sort of people are facing these huge charges, because it seems to me that the people who are more likely to use the system are the ones who cannot visit the relative, who are ringing in as a substitute for a visit, and therefore my instinct tells me that the people who face these high charges are more likely to be the people who are less likely to be able to afford them?

Mr Lewis: The evidence we have is anecdotal but it is that the people who use the service to call in do cover a very wide range of both friends and relatives. They certainly do include those who are on lower incomes and those who may not be able to make the trip into hospital and for whom it is an important means of contact, and I think that is a further compelling reason for the need to change the structure of the provision of these services to enable a reduction in those charges.

Q473 Charlotte Atkins: And also, of course, because the charges come on your normal phone bill, it is quite likely that complaints will not be made direct to yourselves because it is just a nasty shock when your quarterly bill comes through the door.

Mr Lewis: That is true and that is one of the reasons why the NHS has insisted and we have wanted to make sure there is a warning at the beginning of every call so that there is less risk of there being an unpleasant shock when callers receive their bill, but it is an inherent problem with this type of service.

Q474 Charlotte Atkins: We all know that if you are ringing someone whom you are very worried about the likelihood of you listening very closely to that particular warning message is not going to be great.

Mr Lewis: We do have five to six million people who call using Patientline systems each year and the proportion of those who get an unpleasant shock when they receive their telephone bill and are unaware of what they are being charged is quite small.

...

idb wrote on May 10^th, 2006 at 10:36pm:


Good heavens it seems that now that matters are being looked at by the Department of Health that someone may actually be calling for an urgent reduction in the call prices by Patientline.

After all we know that the Masters of Procrastination at Ofcom never ask for an urgent change or reform to any type of commercial scamming and instead find ever more ingenious ways to allow the scamming to drag on year after year.

bbb_uk wrote on May 11^th, 2006 at 12:32am:


And if a consultation does not produce the result that is required by Ofcom then it consults again and again and again until only the paid professional consultee respondents at the Telcos providing the responses that Ofcom actually want to listen to still have the energy left to respond.

That is clearly the approach being employed on this latest review of numbering to which inevitably only a handful of consumers will now respond compared to the original Ofcom consultation on 0845/0870.

Quote:

Well, yes, but the someone quoted is Derek Lewis, at that time the Chairman of Patientline. I doubt that he was advocating reducing charges without the shortfall being made up by the hospital Trusts or the DoH in some form - to quote from his preceding sentence

Quote:

the 'other users' being the hospitals.

The DoH's working party is due to make its first recommendations next month. Given the ongoing and lengthy delays in IT projects such as Electronic Patient Records, I don't forsee rapid progress in the additional income streams becoming available and therefore I await with interest any proposals the working party may make that will enable charges to be reduced.

SICKENING PHONE BILL

Source: http://www.southtynesidetoday.co.uk/ViewArticle2.aspx?SectionID=1111&ArticleID=1...

<<
A COUPLE today blasted a controversial hospital telephone service after they racked up more than £600 worth of calls.
Anna and Norman Roberts are calling on health bosses to install landline bedside phones for patients after using Patientline, an independent pay-as-you-go service.
Mrs Roberts, 34, of Peddars Way, South Shields, was rushed into South Tyneside District Hospital to have pseudocysts on her pancreas removed in October.
After a five-hour emergency operation, she was moved to a bed where she had access to the bedside unit, which gives patients a personal TV, radio, phone and the Internet.
Mrs Roberts, who spent almost seven weeks in hospital over five months, said the facility is a lifeline to the outside world.
But the couple had no idea how expensive it would be.
Calls to the service, which was introduced last year, are charged at 49p-a-minute at peak times and 39p-a-minute off-peak.
An automated instruction message of up to four minutes is charged at the same rate.
One 45-minute call from 34-year-old Mr Roberts to his wife's bedside was itemised at £165.
He called his wife up to five time a day to check on her because he suffers from partial agoraphobia and was unable to visit her.
They have now been cut off by BT and are paying the £633 debt off in instalments.
Mr Roberts: "It's ridiculous. We were aware of the rates to a certain extent, but I really do think that they charge too much."

[...]

A spokesman for the company said: "There is a message at the beginning of each call confirming the call costs for users.
"The focus on balancing pricing levels that will satisfy patients and still enable us to provide high levels of customer service does mean that friends and families are asked to pay more for their incoming calls.
"The cost of operating in a hospital environment is high.
>>

BBC TV News (North East) had items about Patientline charges in their main bulletins yesterday, and quoted the 39p/49p per min charges.
More oxygen for the publicity campaign!

Dave wrote on Jun 12^th, 2006 at 4:52pm:


This is just disgracefully bad.  It proves that no commitment given by Ofcom can be trusted and that they will just perpetually delay postpone and put off controlling any telecoms scams on the grounds that it might damage the profitability of the relevant Telcos.  I hope that a large number of MPs will be tabling parliamentary questions demanding an inquiry into Ofcom's ability to fulfill its primary duty under the Communications Act 2003.

What's the betting that in January 2008 Ofcom will announce that for technical reasons 0870 numbers can't be charged at the geographic national rate as originally promised that year and that the telcos can instead implement this change when they next find it cost effective to make the relevant systems change!

What is the point in people responding to Ofcom consultations when Ofcom ignores all the views of the  general public and just says "poor little telcos. Now we mustn't do anything at all that would damage their valuable business plans and profitability."  Let us hope that Stephen Carter's replacement is someone who put the public interest first rather than an unprincipled commercial charlatan like Ofcom's present CEO.  If I was Ofcom Communications Director Matt Peacock I would strongly be thinking of tendering my resignation by now because all the promises I had previously given to the public on Patientline and 0870 had not been honoured by my CEO.