Quote: Adeybull "My mother was in Leicester Royal Infirmary for several weeks last year. They were just putting in a similar system there.
I guess the point is that patients don't HAVE to use it. But if they DO, the costs are way beyond "steep" and making serious ground on "rip-off".
What is an even bigger rip-off is if you phone (from outside) the bedside phone that comes with the package. Costs the patient nothing, but it cost me about £150 in premium-rate call charges - was something ridiculous like about £1.50 a minute. Be warned! AND you ended up listening to a two minute recorded message first each time.
I guess the thing is, if you go private then you get most of these sort of things in with the room cost. But has anyone seen what the room costs are?? All the NHS seems to be doing is saying you can have some of the benefits of what you might get in a private bed, but - as with a private bed -it will sure as hell cost you.'"
I agree that as a patient having you're own personal tv/radio/internet arm-mounted screen is great, but what isn't is the fact that for a one week stay it's going to cost you £15 to use it and if you want to make phone calls then I would double that £15 to £30.
Hospedia's constant squeezing more money out of patients isn't good publicity for anyone going into hospital and let us all be honest in that patientline has always been too expensive, too much hassle for patients to go get cards from the vending points off the wards, which then causes no end of issues for staff in trying resolve them (such as a patient moving from ward to ward, thus menaing they lose their credit as are locked to the terminal they are first inserted into until the manager shows his face).
My experience of working in a hospital that uses this service is that a good 50% of patients (especially the elderly patients on wards 30,29,9,6 & 3) don't have any means to pay for this service and it's a very sad sight to see them sat in their chairs fed up with nothing to watch and why should anyone on this forum (lifelong Northern/Bulls supporters) who are just recovering from a operation have to pay £3.50 in order to listen to Bradford vs Wigan on a service provided by the hospitals own radio station?
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