Patient Line is a disgusting disgrace Blog Discussion

Fran

robby-01 wrote:

A tv and a phone dont help people get well they may make there stay in hospital more comfortable but it is the staff and the treatment that they provide that gets them well again.

Yes staff and treatment, but people are not in their home environment and that contact with normality is essential to aid them when suddenly they are living with strangers whether nice or not.

robby-01

If it came down to getting treated in a bed without a tv or waiting while a bed with one became available which option do you think people would choose.
The flip side to putting tv's ,phones,radios and whatever else by every bed is treatment.
The nhs provides care(i use the term loosely) for all .It does so on limited resources.It does not have to entertain people while they are ill just treat them.
There are loads of ways that hospitals could be improved to make a patients stay more comfortable but with the limited resources available it is not going to happen.
Paitientline is a step in the right direction ,charge people for the services that they want. To help enhance their stay in hospital.
That way no ones care or treatment is compromised.
They should do the same with meals,if people want something better let them pay for it.
Make a profit from and put that money back into the system to pay for more staff and beds.

ILikeFreebies

I know I'm going slightly off topic here but robby-01 has raised another thing I've experienced recently with the NHS.

The hospital management are selling off the catering/cleaning and entertainment contracts for short term gain. Long term I think it will cst them dearly.

For example, during my wife's stay in hospital after the birth of our son, I was there when here lunch arrived. This was considered her main meal of the day, the evening meal was jut a sandwich. Her main meal consited of a small cup of apple juice, a baked (cremated) potatoe that still had earth on it and a small puddle of bolognaise sauce. The desert was a pot of yoghurt. How can that be considered a main meal for anybody, let alone somebody who is in hospital? My wife avoided bathing for the six days she was in because the baths were so unclean. Anything that fell on the floor was covered with dust. And this was on a ward of newborn babies and new mums, many with stiches from the birth. Safe to say my wife got an infection and couldn't breastfeed until she was home eating real food.

The patientline problem is just one example of the current NHS's problems, private companies making profits from providing sustandard services to the NHS and on to the public

readitonthenet_mustbetrue

before i say anything else - i work in the patientline call centre and understand the frustrations each and every person posting here outlines. i deal with them every day.

there is no denying the fact that 39/49p per minute to make a phone call is expensive. unfortunately installation and running costs do mean that these costs are necessary, although patientline are implementing trials at various sites with reduced costs on incoming calls as well as inclusive rates per day for all four services (tv, telephone, internet & games) meaning patients can use these services an unlimited amount of times in a 24 hour period paying one dailly fee, the average cost of which is around the same as it currently costs in the majority of hospitals for tv alone.

this would mean patients could spend as much time on the phone to loved ones as they wished without paying over the odds.

i also agree with what several people have said. before there was patientline there was (very) limited access to television within wards. it was a single communal television per ward at best which gave patients very little choice in what they watched. telephones were wheeled in only at the convenience of nurses, so if a patient was bedridden (s)he may have been unable to speak to loved ones over the phone at all. in the vast majority of hospitals this service is still available - and there are still phones at nurses stations.

like any other business, patientline is there to make money. it pays my wages as well as those of over a hundred people in a small town where it is an imprtant employer. it also provides an excellent service & i can genuinely say that the majority of people i speak to praise the system more often than not. if only these people would contact the sun and let them know.

unfortunately i had relatives in hospital long before i worked for patientline. i made sure it was available for their use then and would again now. that was my choice. i was grateful to be able to contact my relative on demand. i was pleased and comforted to know they were able to watch tv to take their mind off things when perhaps sleeping was not an option and visiting hours were over. at the end of the day, i was aware of the cost and willing to pay it as were other relatives, no one forced us to do so. had patientline not been there i feel my relatives' stay in hospital would have been less comfortable.

entertainment/luxury costs money. patientline is entertainment and is a luxury. i'd love an x-box 360 dearly but i can't afford in excess of £300 pounds so i cant buy one. even if i was sick.

DevilGoesDown2Bristol

[EDIT: Accidentally posted twice due to forum glitch!]

DevilGoesDown2Bristol

Patientline is not "entertainment and a luxury" as stated by readitonthenet_mustbetrue. What Patientline is, is cobblers. It's a good idea so poorly implemented that it is actually WORSE than not having said facilities at all...

I was in Frenchay hospital for an operation the week before last. I had expected to be able to go home the same evening but was told I had to stay (for a given value of "had to" but you know what I mean).

I was really stressing about this. I am a very, VERY light sleeper and knew I wasn't going to get a moment's peace at the hospital. Bear in mind that when I was having this conversation with the surgeon about staying, I still had the general anaesthetic in my system, was loaded to the gills with morphine, had had only two hours' sleep the night before and was so tired I felt physically sick and I STILL couldn't sleep... I knew I was in for a loooong night.

My girlfriend, bless her heart, went and got me a day's worth of Patientline access: TV, Internet and radio on one of their package deals. I don't watch TV, so it was the Internet I was interested in to save my sanity for the night (I couldn't really hold a book or paper very well at that point). This is how my experience with imPatientline went:

1) Firstly, the instructions telling us how to get the service activated were... well, this is a family forum so let us just say "inadequate". If you've already BOUGHT a Patientline card from a hospital vending machine, the stupid stickers on the unit telling you to "call the operator to buy the service" DO NOT indicate to someone in a post-operative daze that you NEED TO CALL THE OPERATOR ANYWAY.

Come to that, my girlfriend was there trying to work out why nothing was happening when we put the card in and she hadn't just had surgery so I'll go a bit further and just say that the instructions are a load of pants.

Summary 1: The instructions for Patientline are unclear and frustrating.

2) Having finally realised what was going on and the service now activated, I tried to access the Internet. Didn't work. Nothing. Nada. Quickly realised that the reason for this was the broken handset: the telephone keypad was working, but not the keyboard/mouse bit at the back, so I couldn't select the option for activating it.

Well, things break, fair enough... Although of course there's no real way for you to check this BEFORE YOU PAY. Plus the small fact that you'd think a system designed for 24/7 use by sick people would be pretty robust in design, which this wasn't. Anyway, I went through the telephone menu system with the incredibly long preamble (HINT: sick people DO NOT want to spend several minutes navigating through one of the most poxy and ill-thought-out IVR's in the world) and having selected all the correct options was greeted by a recorded message telling me that someone from the in-house support team would be along shortly.

This was at 2pm.

I called FOUR MORE times between then and 6pm, when I finally got the recorded message telling me that EVERYONE HAD GONE HOME and that they'd get back to me the following day. Oh, yes, brilliant, imagine the situation: I've just had an operation under general anaethetic and I'm now so very soothed by the easy access to technology at my bedside that I'm ready to smash it to bits with anything I can lay my hands on, preferably a Patientline staffer's head.

Summary 2: Support for and by Patientline is utter rubbish

3) After I'd taken the handset to bits with a pocket multi-tool and discovered that the problem was, fundamentally, that the micro-switches had been sourced from the rejects bin of a Nepalese Radio Shack, my girlfriend obtained a replacement handset for me with the help of the nurses. That was when I realised that the unit - even when functional - was so badly designed from an ergonomic perspective that it was nigh-unusable. The little rubber joystick was very difficult to get to grips with, and made moving the pointer around the screen a real chore. It was also awkward in the extreme to use without accidentally pushing a button on the other side of the unit and thus navigating yourself away from the screen you have just so painstakingly accessed.

Summary 3: The system is poorly designed, cheaply made and frankly insulting in terms of overall quality. It's certainly absolutely unsuitable for use by anyone with limited digital mobility and this system was supposed to be designed for HOSPITALS, for crying out loud.

4) I was astonished to be confronted by what looked like IE 3.0, although I couldn't check the version because it was so locked down. Most of the websites I tried to visit didn't work because they used technology that has only been around for seven or eight years. The browser is so out-of-date that even when (or IF) you do manage to access the Internet, you won't be able to access most of the popular sites in any meaningful way. And before anybody starts bleating about viruses and other aspects of security, I'd like to point out that I'm the principal information security consultant for a major telecommunications company and I know precisely what can be achieved with a halfway-decent kiosk build.

The Patientline implementation is amateurish, plain and simple.

Summary 4: The technology deployed by Patientline was years out of date before it was ever implemented and doesn't offer the funcionality that you think you're paying for.

5) In an attempt to relieve my feelings a little, I tried to complete the browser-based feedback questionnaire that another poster has mentioned. After laboriously navigating my way through it, it crashed on the last page with a "page not found" message. You can probably imagine my reaction.

There's no summary message to take away from this bit other than "Patientline sucks". I would have been far better off had the service not been there at all rather than getting worked up about having paid for facilities that either didn't work or were just completely inadequate.

You can bang on about companies being there to make money and how great they are for paying wages, but the same is true of ALL companies. A significant proportion of this site is devoted to pointing out the ones who provide services particularly well or badly: Patienline, without a doubt, falls resoundingly into the latter category.

My conclusion: Patientline is a deeply cynical, out-and-out disgusting rip-off designed to milk the great NHS cash-cow *and* its patients at the same time. Someone had a great idea about a service that could be given to patients, realised there was a gap in the market, and then proceeded - having won the business - to concentrate entirely on how the minimum functionality specified in the contract could be delivered whilst extracting the maximum amount of cash. It's not really a service designed with patients in mind at all.

Of course, it's not only Patientline at fault. The woefully technologically-ignorant NHS middle-management muppet who signed the contract should bear some of the blame, although whoever it was will probably receive some sort of medal for continuing the grand traditions of the NHS: to whit, paying ten times as much for a service a quarter as good as anything in the private sector.

Note that I haven't even bothered quibbling over prices yet. I suppose I choose to pay or not to pay for a service I want, although the prices some people have mentioned are utterly disgusting and it's not like you have a choice of vendor from a hospital bed. "Installation and maintenance costs" are minimal on that sort of network so the prices in my view are utterly disproportionate. But when I pay for it and find out it doesn't work properly, is poorly designed, poorly implemented and poorly supported... then I get mad.

"Before Patientline there was poor choice of" blah, blah, blah... so what?! Does that give Patientline the excuse to provide a naff service for lots of money, simply because everyone was sharing a telly before they turned up? I don't have an issue with fair and proportionate charges for optional services at the bedside: as other have said, that's a step in the right direction. I have a major problem with the way Patientline goes about it and the shoddy service they provide, and there's simply no excuse for it.

bigjim86

DevilGoesDown2Bristol wrote:

Patientline is not "entertainment and a luxury" as stated by readitonthenet_mustbetrue. Yes it is. What Patientline is, is cobblers. It's a good idea so poorly implemented that it is actually WORSE than not having said facilities at all...
Optional system, don't use it next time and phone patientline customer liaison to get your money back

I was in Frenchay hospital for an operation the week before last. I had expected to be able to go home the same evening but was told I had to stay (for a given value of "had to" but you know what I mean).

I was really stressing about this. I am a very, VERY light sleeper and knew I wasn't going to get a moment's peace at the hospital. Bear in mind that when I was having this conversation with the surgeon about staying, I still had the general anaesthetic in my system, was loaded to the gills with morphine, had had only two hours' sleep the night before and was so tired I felt physically sick and I STILL couldn't sleep... I knew I was in for a loooong night.

My girlfriend, bless her heart, went and got me a day's worth of Patientline access: TV, Internet and radio on one of their package deals. I don't watch TV, so it was the Internet I was interested in to save my sanity for the night (I couldn't really hold a book or paper very well at that point). This is how my experience with imPatientline went:

1) Firstly, the instructions telling us how to get the service activated were... well, this is a family forum so let us just say "inadequate". If you've already BOUGHT a Patientline card from a hospital vending machine, the stupid stickers on the unit telling you to "call the operator to buy the service" DO NOT indicate to someone in a post-operative daze that you NEED TO CALL THE OPERATOR ANYWAY.

Come to that, my girlfriend was there trying to work out why nothing was happening when we put the card in and she hadn't just had surgery so I'll go a bit further and just say that the instructions are a load of pants.
Fair enough, the instructions may be inadequate, but if it's not working or has someone elses name on the screen, generally a drugged up monkey would have the sense to press the operator button.

Summary 1: The instructions for Patientline are unclear and frustrating.

2) Having finally realised what was going on and the service now activated, I tried to access the Internet. Didn't work. Nothing. Nada. Quickly realised that the reason for this was the broken handset: the telephone keypad was working, but not the keyboard/mouse bit at the back, so I couldn't select the option for activating it.

Well, things break, fair enough... Although of course there's no real way for you to check this BEFORE YOU PAY. Ask for a refund. Plus the small fact that you'd think a system designed for 24/7 use by sick people would be pretty robust in design, which this wasn't. Anyway, I went through the telephone menu system with the incredibly long preamble (HINT: sick people DO NOT want to spend several minutes navigating through one of the most poxy and ill-thought-out IVR's in the world) Fair enough. and having selected all the correct options was greeted by a recorded message telling me that someone from the in-house support team would be along shortly.

This was at 2pm.

I called FOUR MORE times between then and 6pm, when I finally got the recorded message telling me that EVERYONE HAD GONE HOME and that they'd get back to me the following day. Oh, yes, brilliant, imagine the situation: I've just had an operation under general anaethetic and I'm now so very soothed by the easy access to technology at my bedside that I'm ready to smash it to bits with anything I can lay my hands on, preferably a Patientline staffer's head.
Not a nice situation to be in but these people have a whole hospital to get round so they can't always get to you in 3 hours (Generally the staff work til 5pm due to costs). They may be attending other problems.

Summary 2: Support for and by Patientline is utter rubbish

3) After I'd taken the handset to bits with a pocket multi-tool and discovered that the problem was, fundamentally, that the micro-switches had been sourced from the rejects bin of a Nepalese Radio Shack, my girlfriend obtained a replacement handset for me with the help of the nurses. That was when I realised that the unit - even when functional - was so badly designed from an ergonomic perspective that it was nigh-unusable. The little rubber joystick was very difficult to get to grips with, and made moving the pointer around the screen a real chore. It was also awkward in the extreme to use without accidentally pushing a button on the other side of the unit and thus navigating yourself away from the screen you have just so painstakingly accessed. I agree, not well designed

Summary 3: The system is poorly designed, cheaply made and frankly insulting in terms of overall quality. It's certainly absolutely unsuitable for use by anyone with limited digital mobility and this system was supposed to be designed for HOSPITALS, for crying out loud.
Poorly designed - yes. Cheaply made - couldn't be further from the truth

4) I was astonished to be confronted by what looked like IE 3.0, although I couldn't check the version because it was so locked down. Most of the websites I tried to visit didn't work because they used technology that has only been around for seven or eight years. The browser is so out-of-date that even when (or IF) you do manage to access the Internet, you won't be able to access most of the popular sites in any meaningful way. And before anybody starts bleating about viruses and other aspects of security, I'd like to point out that I'm the principal information security consultant for a major telecommunications company and I know precisely what can be achieved with a halfway-decent kiosk build.[
B]Again I would agree, it is badly designed.[/B]

The Patientline implementation is amateurish, plain and simple.

Summary 4: The technology deployed by Patientline was years out of date before it was ever implemented and doesn't offer the funcionality that you think you're paying for.
I have to say though, when you spend the amount of money they have developing and building all of these units, which you might not believe, but they have, then it's hard to just splash out on new software or unit designs and implement them.

5) In an attempt to relieve my feelings a little, I tried to complete the browser-based feedback questionnaire that another poster has mentioned. After laboriously navigating my way through it, it crashed on the last page with a "page not found" message. You can probably imagine my reaction.
Harsh, and not pleasant I'm sure.

There's no summary message to take away from this bit other than "Patientline sucks". I would have been far better off had the service not been there at all rather than getting worked up about having paid for facilities that either didn't work or were just completely inadequate.

You can bang on about companies being there to make money and how great they are for paying wages, but the same is true of ALL companies. A significant proportion of this site is devoted to pointing out the ones who provide services particularly well or badly: Patienline, without a doubt, falls resoundingly into the latter category.
It's not great but not as bad as you make it out to be

My conclusion: Patientline is a deeply cynical, out-and-out disgusting rip-off designed to milk the great NHS cash-cow It costs the NHS nothing.*and* its patients at the same time. It doesn't deliberately rip its customers off believe it or not conspiracy man, I can assure you but you probably won't believe that. Someone had a great idea about a service that could be given to patients, realised there was a gap in the market, and then proceeded - having won the business - to concentrate entirely on how the minimum functionality specified in the contract could be delivered whilst extracting the maximum amount of cash. I'm almost positive it wasn't intended that way.It's not really a service designed with patients in mind at all.

Of course, it's not only Patientline at fault. The woefully technologically-ignorant NHS middle-management muppet who signed the contract should bear some of the blame, although whoever it was will probably receive some sort of medal for continuing the grand traditions of the NHS: to whit, paying ten times as much for a service a quarter as good as anything in the private sector. Again I repeat, it cost and still costs the NHS nothing so congratulations to the NHS for not having to foot the bill. Then again, if they had, the service would be better and the prices lower. What would you prefer?

Note that I haven't even bothered quibbling over prices yet. I suppose I choose to pay or not to pay for a service I want, although the prices some people have mentioned are utterly disgusting and it's not like you have a choice of vendor from a hospital bed. "Installation and maintenance costs" are minimal on that sort of network so the prices in my view are utterly disproportionate. You don't know what you're talking about mate. Whilst IT techs might think they know everything, to install a 200 unit system in a hospital (the smallest patientline do) it costs £1,000,000. But when I pay for it and find out it doesn't work properly, is poorly designed, poorly implemented and poorly supported... then I get mad. Fair enough, I'm sure I would get mad too, but a refund is available.

"Before Patientline there was poor choice of" blah, blah, blah... so what?! Does that give Patientline the excuse to provide a naff service for lots of money, simply because everyone was sharing a telly before they turned up? No but it isn't intended as a naff service as you seem so keen on speculating.I don't have an issue with fair and proportionate charges for optional services at the bedside: as other have said, that's a step in the right direction. I have a major problem with the way Patientline goes about it and the shoddy service they provide, and there's simply no excuse for it.

I'd just like to say a few things. Firstly, Patientline is badly designed and expensive. I realise this. BUT... Things are improving all the time with regards to software in the units and costs to the customers, and hopefully the hardware will improve too. For Frenchay hospital, it cost well in excess of £2,000,000 (perhaps even £3m - £4m but I don't have the figure here) just to install and because PLine has over 150 hospitals, this is some outlay.

Then came the offcom enquiry. Patientline had it's bank accounts frozen for a year, meaning wages almost weren't payed and that no maintenance, spare parts or upgrades on the system were done. Now the charges are so high because the company is in almost £100m of debt and is trying to pay off creditors as well as improve the service (upgrades to software etc come out almost weekly btw) and pay staff.

It's no easy task to lift Patientline but the prices are coming down and the service is coming up. If the company hadn't took on so many hospitals at once then things would be better and if people hadn't complained so much in the first place, things would be better.

readitonthenet_mustbetrue

i must admit, the second last post made me chuckle. many words to basically say - at first i couldnt figure out how to use it, then the internet broke, when it worked i wasnt satisfied with the service.

it's a shame, it really is. i must admit though - i am utterly amazed you decided to take the remote cotrol apart before thinking about swapping it. i mean come on. seriouisly? was that maybe just a little bit of the - "im a man, i can fix it, i know better than these call centre workers, im in IT" syndrome?

dont get me wrong, when these things dont work its frustrating, but at the end of the day it is an optional service. no-one's forcing it upon you. if it breaks you'll get a refund - there aint a masked man demanding your cash at gunpoint.

nothing's perfect but it's getting a lot better, and the reason it hasnt done so faster is people with the arrogance to complain because "they know best" without actually listening to what they're advised, without asking for their money back and without understanding that cases like this are in the minority cause problems like the offcom one, making it harder for the service to improve.

if you didn't have a good experience, im sorry, really. but instead of mouthing off to the press or writing to your MP's demanding an enquiry, just dont use it next time. that way perhaps the hundred of thousands who do enjoy patientline can look forward to the service getting better, and patientline can put their resources to better use than defending themselves, when really there's not a lot to actually defend.

Fran

The service should be impeccable in a hospital, there shouldn't be a need for all that hassle to go online! :mad:

I visited someone in a hospital recently and these Patietline things were hardly being used.

If phone calls were cheap then everyone would use them, same with the tele, who wants to pay £3.50 just to watch an hour of their favourite programme or a footy match? Okay if you're in for a day or two but what about people in there over a week?

People had brought their own mobiles and teles into the ward because it was cheaper and less hassle.

Not only that but the bloody machine comes on at 7am including sound to try to get sick people to use it. :mad:

readitonthenet_mustbetrue

you know, you're abolutely right. congratulations. you have now solved an age old problem with just about everything in the whole world. the service should be impeccable. what a comment. again, well done. go you.

no offence, but what kind of a thing to say is that!?! of course the service should be impeccable. you know what, there should be no war either. in fact, now that you mention it, all the religious hatred, crime & just general horribleness in the world, well that shoudnt be there. sorted.

now can we be realistic please, just for a second? thanks.

patientline genuinely does its best to please its customers. just like any other company. ok, so patientline's customers are sick, but as has been said a few times before, if you're too sick & the whole thought of it upsets you, dont use it. its a luxury, theres no questoning that, theres no argument to have there, its a simple matter of fact. patientline is a luxury.

hospitals are places sick peple go to get better. the nhs pays doctors, nurses etc. to make people better. you go, you take medicine or have surgery or whatever else is required, then fingers crossed you leave. while there you have a choice. you either get better staring at the ceiling or you can watch patientline tv. its up to you, but you know how much it costs. if you want it and can afford it, awesome, if not, fair enough. its not part of the healing process. its tv/internet/phone. ergo, you dont need it. you might just want it. if you do, pay for it and take it as it is. if not, dont damn well pay for it & you wont have to complain about it.

and a point, if whole wards are using mobiles and their own tv's, why do i sit in a call centre night in night out with a constant flow of calls comprising of people buying credit or signing up to use patientline?