pw4 wrote on Dec 4
th, 2006 at 8:11pm:
So mobile phones will soon be allowed in loads of places in NHS hospitals, Patientline will go bust and then another company will pick up Patientline's assets for a song and start offering tv and phone calls at low sensible prices.
I don't think that sequence of events is likely.
It is undesirable from hospitals' point of view to allow the use of mobiles on open wards, and as long as that is the case the clause in their Patient Power concession agreements requiring them to ban mobile phones on wards will apply.
If Patientline or any of the other Patient Power providers became insolvent I can't imagine any other company taking a chance on entering the business. This would leave patients with no telephone and TV facilities, and so it is in the Department of Health's interest to avoid that scenario.
So which Director of Patientline are you then.
patient power without the capital Ps but via ripped off hospital patients and their MPs will see the needless and despicable ban on mobile phones in hospital rescinded by the government in all but acute wards or areas where it may genuinely be relevant. Your lousy overpriced service will then go bust and the assets will be picked up for next to nothing and used to provide sensibly priced phone calls and television for hospital patients.
In the longer run (10 years on) people will all have their own IP based portable hand held computers that they can use either over cheap to install wireless hospital networks or perhaps just via a general WiMax network covering that city by then. Unless Patient Power contracts require radiation shielding to be installed to force hospital patients to use PatientScam.
Then your hopelessly overpriced unreliable terminals will be utterly worthless and Patientline directors will find themselves either in prison or in the poorhouse where they deserve to be after such a despicable and cynical plan to fleece the sick and elderly.