Losing my patience

Here, Mark Patterson recounts his often farcical experience of the system during a two-week stay in a County Durham hospital

AS a rule you don't find graffiti in NHS hospitals. But until recently "They rob you" was in one of the lifts at Bishop Auckland General. The words had been written across an advertisement for Patientline, the private company which provides bedside entertainment systems and telephones for patients at Bishop Auckland General and many other NHS hospitals across the country.

And after a two-week stay in a general medical ward at Bishop Auckland earlier this year, I can only say I sympathise with the disgruntled person who defaced the ad.

As The Northern Echo editor Peter Barron noted in his column recently, Patientline's call costs for relatives phoning into the hospital to speak to patients on their bedside phone are exorbitantly high. But it gets worse: based on my experience, a system which should make a hospital stay more pleasant is, in fact, far too complicated and is prone to frequent breakdowns which often cannot be remedied, because Patientline doesn't appear to have technicians on site. More often than not, this means you may spend up to 15 or 20 minutes on the phone to Patientline's call centre in Dumfries waiting to get through to someone who may or may not be able to sort your problem.

By the time I left Bishop Auckland General I had spent so long on the phone to Patientline's call centre I could almost recite its automated message word for word. The farce concluded when one of the Patientline TVs in my ward refused to switch off shortly before bedtime and an auxiliary nurse was forced to take time out from his nightshift to go home so he could find an Allen key to switch the damn thing off at the wall.

For all those fortunate enough not to have been in hospital recently, the Patientline TV and phone terminal sits beside every bed on an extendable arm. Apart from providing a personal bedside telephone number and range of TV channels, the terminal offers games, radio, internet and email. The company, based in Slough, provides such consoles to around 75,000 NHS hospital beds under a contract with the Government which pledged that all major hospitals should have bedside TV and telephones. Each terminal costs around £1,700.

One could easily argue that such terminals are a vast improvement over the old NHS "entertainment" regime which was usually hospital radio and a single TV set blaring out from the corner of each ward. Patientline's bedside telephones also remove the need for patients to wander around in search of public payphones.

But the technical problems with Patientline really begin with the payment system.

Bishop Auckland General is now furnished with Patientline vending machines offering three kinds of credit card-sized payment cards priced at £3.50, £5 and £10. The £3.50 card gets you a day's worth of console access (which actually costs £2.90, leaving you with 60p of credit stored in the system) while the tenner gives you five days of bedside fun.

To get your console working, you have to slot these cards into the bottom of the machine.

Instructions on the back of the card warn this might not work and, if so, you should wipe the card and reinsert it. When my card still didn't work I made the first call to Dumfries and was asked to read out a long number on the card. Now I was in business. But later I changed to a different bed, and discovered the new console was still registered to the previous patient. I had to reregister the console, which required another call to the call centre.

Now, while I consider myself fairly computer-literate, I found this system intimidating and offputting.

And I was the youngest person on my ward.

The diary I kept, borne partly out of frustration with Patientline, reminds me I had to set up Patientline for three middle-aged men on my ward because they couldn't face the complexities of getting the console credited and registered.

Then there are the telephone costs. Calls from Patientline phones to the outside world cost 26p per minute, up from the previous 10pper- minute rate. However, calls to your bedside phone from friends and relatives cost 49p-perminute at peak times and 39p at off-peak times.

You can avoid such costs by using a public telephone in hospital - if you can find one and if you can walk, that is. Alternatively, you could use a mobile phone - so long as you have one, and many elderly people don't, and so long as your hospital allows their use.

Patientline's explanation for its high call costs is that it has spent millions and this is one way it makes good its investment. The telecoms watchdog Ofcom investigated Patientline over its call charges in 2005 but cleared it of wrong-doing. Last year, Patientline reported losses of over £30m and had debts of more than £80m.

It is worth saying no comments about Patientline should be misconstrued as a criticism of Bishop Auckland General's staff, who were all exemplary representatives of the NHS. Trouble is, nobody had been trained in how to use, or mend, the consoles when they went wrong. Games? I tried them once and the computer said no'. Email? I got my BT Yahoo inbox open once. The woman in Dumfries explained there were probably a lot of people using the internet at the time and I should try later. I did try later, again and again and again...

Meanwhile, my telly went wrong. This was on a Friday and nurses assured me that since nobody from Patientline was around over the weekend, the problem couldn't be sorted until Monday.

I called Dumfries again (calls to Patientline itself are free at least) and asked if there was a Patientline technician on site? Yes, someone would come around. But nobody did. I called again and asked if I could have the phone number of the technician.

"I'm sorry, but we don't have the numbers of the technical people."

HOW then, I wondered, had they passed on the message that I needed assistance? I never found out. Patientline says it has a manager and at least one customer service representative at each hospital. "Depending on the size of the hospital we have a number of customer service representatives who go from bed to bed during the day to make sure patients know what they are doing," said a spokesman. "They aim to see everybody at least once during the day. We also have technical staff who can sort out any problems. I'm surprised you didn't see anybody at Bishop Auckland."

I was surprised too. And very frustrated and angry.

When I put these various problems to Patientline, the spokesman stated: "The bedside consoles are used by more than six million customers annually, and while we pride ourselves on the quality of service that we provide, unfortunately there are sometimes isolated problems with the system. This appears to have been the case in Bishop Auckland, but we have worked to resolve this issue and are now providing a better service than ever."

Conclusions? I could never recommend scrawling graffiti in an NHS hospital. But, if I ever do go back into hospital, I will avoid Patientline by arming myself with some good books, a mobile phone and a mobile DVD player or laptop on which I can play games and watch movies. And I will try my hardest to be friendly to anybody from Dumfries.