Oct 2 article: Inside the City: Patientline hit by £100m sick note (The Sunday Times - Business)
Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2095-1806775,00.html

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SHARES in Patientline, the company that provides bedside telephony and televisions in hospital, have fallen 75% since the start of 2004, destroying more than £100m of shareholder value.

The dramatic collapse is not that surprising. Even Evolution Securities, one of the company’s own advisers, admits it has concerns about the firm breaching its banking covenants — although Patientline insists they are unfounded.

Run by Derek Lewis, former director-general of the Prison Service, Patientline has more than £80m debt and has racked up losses of nearly £30m since its 2001 float.

Ofcom, the telecoms regulator, announced in July that it was investigating the cost of calling a Patientline phone. Calls cost 49p a minute, compared with the 16p price of calling a mobile phone.

Half of all Patientline revenues are generated from incoming calls — and Evolution has warned that an adverse ruling from Ofcom could bring the “business model into question”. Patientline is confident of being cleared, but has nevertheless postponed installing new units until Ofcom completes its investigation.

As if the Ofcom probe were not enough, Patientline also had to admit to poor trading in July. A number of NHS trusts have temporarily closed wards in an attempt to “balance their books”, leaving 1,000 Patientline terminals idle.

The company may feel aggrieved that, having spent millions of pounds installing bedside televisions and telephones, Ofcom is now considering moving the goalposts by attempting to reduce the amount the firm can charge. But the cost of calls has caused real anger. In the past 12 months more than 100 formal complaints about Patientline have been lodged with NHS trusts.

Patientline is not only a lesson in the destruction of shareholder value; it is also a reminder to investors that — despite today’s fashion for private-sector involvement in the public sector — doing business with government is not always straightforward.
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They don't miss a chance to deceive the public.

I recently visited Southport and Formby General Hospital.  The Patientline phones that I encountered there were in the sequence 0704 XXXX.  By a strange coincidence 0704 happens to have been the local dialing code for the area before the big number change added a 1 to make it 01704.  It strikes me that this is more than a coincidence and I would go so far as to suggest it is a deliberate attempt to deceive the local populace in an area which is acknowledged as having a high proportion of elderly and retired people.

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Looks like Mr Lewis will have to make do with just the one yacht then and may be having to travel Club Class instead of First Class.

It couldn't happen to a nicer bloke.

Having read your link NGM, I understand that Patientline failed to meet a previously set deadline of 13 June 2005 to give each patient their own 07 number. Presumably there are Patientline systems where one dials an 07 number and gets a prompt to enter an extension number.

So Patientline 'missed' that deadline, so Ofcom has given it another six months to 13 December 2005 to comply with this!

So what is the 14 June 2006 date for? Am I right in understanding that the "six month extension" to 13 December is for all but 25 sites? So the real 'deadline' is 14 June 2006?

So how many sites does Patientline have? What percentage is this 25? What happened to the scandal of being charged 49p/min to calls these numbers?

Ofcom have just published this consultation on new regulations to stop the abuse of 070 Personal Numbers.

http://www.ofcom.org.uk/consult/condocs/personal_numbering/pn.pdf

I don't think it is directly relevant to the 49p per minute Patientline scam although I think it may include some other forms of 070 personal number abuse that mc661 has previously highlighted to me.

But the more I think about it the more i can't see what is different about these numbers from an 0871  or 09 call redirection service and am at a loss as why Personal Numbers are allocated in the 07 numbering block otherwise used for mobile phones.

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Ah yes good old OFTEL.  Better known as the "friends of all the best Telco ripoffs society".

Would that be the same OFTEL director who told me if I didn't like the price of 0870 numbers then I didn't have to call them and that as long as there was competition for the call centre operators to get the best revenue share on 0870 then this fully accomplished all OFTEL's objectives!

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Very Good.  I like your way of thinking.

But don't forget to respond to the Ofcom consultation slating the appalling lies they have told to justify retaining the 0845 revenue sharing scamming.

I don't think their consultation document even seems to acknowldege the possibility that all the 0870 scamsters might just change over to 0845 instead.