TVs in hospital: £10 a day!

mazza111

We were really lucky last time my DD was taken in for her psoriasis treatment, wanted to keep her in 3-4 weeks. She managed 12 days. Most of this was in a private room that patientline hadn't set up in yet, so she managed to set up her portable, her xbox, her laptop and buy a 3 sim card to get it all going.

Was great until they moved her back into the ward where the only option for tv was patientline. Then it was something like £5 for basic channels for 12 hours.

I agree this is perhaps something the NHS could look into doing for themselves, after all the profits that are being made from it must be astronomical.

katejo

Ellejmorgan wrote: »

I was in for 5 days in Feb and paid £20, got all freeview and made free phonecalls to landlines...

Has doubled you are right used to be £2 per day, it's worse on maternity they bedhopped me when I had my baby, was moved 4 times, one lass couldn't get her tv on as no staff on the patientline, so she lost her money when she was bedhopped...

I think it's one of those things we have to just do when ill as it's no fun sitting there with nothing to do...

I am surprised that you were able to make free calls to landlines. I had a short stay for an op in 2005. There were no free phone calls and the phone by the bed was extremely expensive, even for people who rang me. Fortunately i wasn't confined to bed so was able to go out to the payphone in the corridor. It wasn't a high tech ward so patients began to use their mobiles and the staff turned a blind eye to it.

The TV was very expensive too. Anyone who was due to have treatment/op the next day lost a large chunk of the day for which they had paid due to being under anaesthetic.

arcon5

mynameistallulah wrote: »

And the costs of customer support, interest on the initial outlay, maintenance etc?

Sorry, but we're not talking about a car or a complicated piece of machinery here, we're talking about a small TV set which you would expect to last 3-5 years.

If a private corporation can afford to run the scheme at a profit whilst paying commission then there is no reason the NHS can't.

In fact @ £10/day you could afford to outright replace a TV instead of maintaining them.

mynameistallulah wrote: »

Simple - economies of scale, and far greater efficiency than the NHS is capable of.

The NHS is not a SMB, they would be buying the TVs in the thousands.


I don't understand how anybody can defend this.

MarkBargain wrote: »

The only cheaper 'bundle' was £5 for 12 hours of 5 channels, but Grandad's favourite channel is BBC News 24 so he'd want the standard Freeview channels (not too much to ask really) and £10 was the cheapest for a day I believe.

In 2006 it was £3.50 for 18 channels according to the article.

I think £3.50/day is still a very viable price for watching a TV to be honest.

Bowling_4_Gold

I'm pretty sure you can listen to the radio for free on them- that's what my Dad did when he was in IIRC.

MarkBargain

It's funny that virtually everywhere you go from pubs to shops to airports to London underground that you cannot avoid TV screens, yet step into a hospital and it's impossible to watch TV without shelling out vast sums of money.

Toshiba LED TVs are only £119.99: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Toshiba-19BL502B-19-inch-Widescreen-Freeview/dp/B00778ENKQ/ref=sr_1_12?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1338925805&sr=1-12 and I am sure the NHS could negotiate better prices and include 5 year warranties for maintenence. Charge a quid a day and this would pay for itself in a few months!

Another point I would make, is that after studying the top-up machines and leaflets I still did not have a clue how much it cost. Only after looking at the TV itself did the rip-off become apparent.

MarkBargain

Bowling_4_Gold wrote: »

I'm pretty sure you can listen to the radio for free on them- that's what my Dad did when he was in IIRC.

That's something at least but my Grandad is deaf sadly, so needs TV with subtitles.

paddyrg

1) core competencies - the NHS should be running health services, not replacing lost remote controls/dealing with TV's on the fritz. If they operated the scheme, the nurses would get the brunt of it, and they shouldn't have to.
2) cabling / freeview boxes / etc is a big job - you need many distribution amplifiers, box retuning when bored patients try to get the 10 mins of unencrypted mucky channels at midnight, etc.
3) Entitled oiks would complain about the NHS tellies, how they should be free, etc.
4) How would they collect/enforce the money? Collecting money costs money
5) Theft - a load of freeview tellies would be a theft magnet. Every scrote for miles would be in there trying to rob them.
6) £2M profit isn't a big deal when divided across the number of patient bed nights across the NHS - meaning clearly the overheads are high.

My 6 reasons why not to take it in-house. I think they are pretty good.

MarkBargain

paddyrg wrote: »

1) core competencies - the NHS should be running health services, not replacing lost remote controls/dealing with TV's on the fritz. If they operated the scheme, the nurses would get the brunt of it, and they shouldn't have to.

The NHS should bring in income where it can, not fund private firms.

Also, according to Wiki:

"With the removal of Hospedia personnel at hospitals and telephone operators from the Dumfries Call Centre, The company have relied heavily on NHS medical and support staff to operate the system, staff now clean the televisions due to infection control issues, this has been seen as a clever way of shifting the responsibility of a private profit making organisation to maintain their own equipment within the NHS by utilising staff funded by the taxpayer. Staff have complained that since the reduction/removal of the Hospedia card dispensers they are having to take time out of caring for patients to spend up to 30 mins off a ward to locate a machine."

2) cabling / freeview boxes / etc is a big job - you need many distribution amplifiers, box retuning when bored patients try to get the 10 mins of unencrypted mucky channels at midnight, etc.

Freeview is integrated into the sets.

3) Entitled oiks would complain about the NHS tellies, how they should be free, etc.

They have a point, as prisioners get them.

4) How would they collect/enforce the money? Collecting money costs money
5) Theft - a load of freeview tellies would be a theft magnet. Every scrote for miles would be in there trying to rob them.

There is some validity to these points, but these could be overcome. Voluntary donations to the cash office perhaps and some security alongside of acceptance of risk.

6) £2M profit isn't a big deal when divided across the number of patient bed nights across the NHS - meaning clearly the overheads are high.

Well, £2M would pay for a few nurses.

Elvisia

I do think they cost a fortune, and I am pretty sure they've already been on Watchdog or similar because they are way too expensive. They should be the responsibility of an external firm, but I think having some sort of card swipe system would be better where you pay per hour perhaps, and it's much cheaper than the extraordinary charges. It needs to be an in-house NHS dept that does it where they don't make profit but they provide a desperately needed service. My dad didn't have one when he was on a old people's ward, and his only entertainment was trying to shift himself around while wearing no pyjama bottoms (they got lost somewhere) and watching the old men around him die slowly. He nearly went spare.

Can you even use ipads in the hospital, with perhaps a dongle? I have visions of logging onto the internet and it interfering with hospital equipment and someone's iron lung going offline or something.

paddyrg

1) ...except the NHS shouldn't be getting into unrelated markets, in my opinion. They could easily branch into running pharmacies, nursing agencies, etc., but this creates a kind of superstate and its own costs. As for removal of vending machines for cards, I suspect the bulk of people will pay by credit card, maybe even direct from the terminal. Cleaning of the units, can't really see a way round that, other than the tables, etc get cleaned so makes sense for them to be too to reduce cross infection. It's not as if cleaning constitutes technical maintenance.

2). Freeview boxes are only a small part of that list. Cabling, distribution amplifiers to boost signals for several hundred sets without signal degradation (digital particularly suceptible), tuning and setting up, remote getting lost/stolen/batteries being used for walkmans. It's not like you put in a TV and everything is just dandy and working, there is an overhead, and with several hundred sets, it is significant. Plus having to lock all those sets down securely and unlock/replace/get fixed the few % that flake out each year.

3). Thought we were just saying the NHS would/should benefit financially?

4)5) Voluntary donations? Remember the £100 TV is only a small part of the cost, the whole network and management thereof and spare remotes and batteries etc - plus combined with point 3)... A ward of 30 beds is £3k of brand new tellies that can vanish in a night.

6) Voluntary donations and high setup and running costs would pretty much guarantee losing money - that's a few nurses lost! But back to my point - if a commercial organisation with commercial cost-cutting approaches pushing some of the work off (per your comment in 1) ) to NHS staff is able to make a profit in the region of pennies per patient bed per night, the margins are too thin to guarantee the NHS won't lose money on it. NHS staff are more unionised etc than the commerical company, so the losses would actually probably be greater.

Fact is I love the NHS, I genuinely believe in it, I admire the vision behind it, the lack of commerical interest within it, and the dedication of pretty much everyone working within it. I do also recognise that you think your plan would be an easy win for the NHS coffers and benefit patients, and respect that vision and desire - just I think it is more expensive than you think, and that the returns smaller than you do to. I think it would inevitably end up costing my beloved NHS money that should be spent on health/core competencies as opposed to spanking a mint on an experiment needing its own beurocracy etc. We differ!