Patientline reverses on patient call charges
- 8 August 2007
Patientline, the hospital entertainment and phone provider, will reduce the prices on outgoing telephone calls from tomorrow, just four months after they increased rates.
The company was forced to restructure its fees in April, when they revealed they were £80m in debt and needed to make up expenditure costs.
This was followed in June, with news that Patientline was holding urgent talks with its banks to renegotiate its debt payments so that it could invest in new technology and cut prices.
A Patientline spokesperson told E-Health Insider: “From 8 August, outgoing call charges will be reduced. No other prices will be affected. This is the second price reduction we have made this year, having reduced the cost of watching television from a hospital bed in April.
"The price cut is testament to our dedication to making people’s stay in hospital easier, by offering customers some of the entertainment and communication choices they would enjoy at home.”
From tomorrow, the cost of outgoing calls from Patientline’s bedside consoles will fall from 26p to 10p a minute. The minimum call charge will be cut from 40p to 10p.
This takes the cost of a call back to what it was before April’s price restructure of phone call fees.
However, the cost of calling a patient in hospital remains at 49p a minute during peak periods and 39p a minute between 6pm and 8am and at weekends.
The inbound calling fees remain unchanged despite advice from phone and television services regulator, Ofcom, that Patientline could be breaking competition laws because of the high charges for dialling into hospitals.
A Patients Association spokesperson said: “It [49p] is getting pretty close to robbery, frankly. They must realise that most of these people are not in a position to pay these sort of fees.”
In April, the company cut the cost of watching beside television from £3.50 a day to £2.90 a day. The new price also included internet, e-mail and games, which were previously charged separately.
The spokesperson declined to comment about talks with banks but said that the price cut was ‘proof of its dedication to making people’s stay in hospital easier.’
The Patientline bedside console provides a personal phone and personal number, and the patient can choose what they want to watch on television and when.
Patientline has systems installed at over 75,000 hospital bedsides in England, but has recently come under threat from the Department of Health’s decision to relax rules on mobile phone usage in wards.
Links
