Petition on Patientline's prices.
Patientline in response to thousands of complaints, deminishing revenue and mounting pressure (not least from the esteemed editor of this blog) have reduced the charge rate for phone calls from their 75,000 hospital bedside units back to 10 pence per minute.
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The company had raised the cost of an out going call from 10 per minute to 26p in April. There will be no reduction in the exorbitant charge of 49p a minute for friends and relatives to call patients at their hospital beds.
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Patientline a PLC as we have commented before - but does no harm to stress - is run by directors who have more in common with the management style of first world war generals than the best practice of modern corporate management.
The Senior management of the debt ridden company are so far removed from the front line of their company's operation that they are quite oblivious to the stress they are causing their own staff, as well as patients, nursing and care staff. A point that the editor of the blog made on commercial radio in the North East yesterday.
Patientline's products are difficult to use, the pricing structure is complex and the equipment is very unreliable with spare parts and basic equipment in short supply.
Readers should consider that as they read this piece Patientline staff are being sent over the top, fired up with an incentive of hundreds of pounds of gift vouchers to sell an over priced and unreliable service to sick people.
If the NHS management is not willing to call a halt to Patientline's unacceptable practices then the current situation is one that Gordon Brown should put on his list of changes since Patientline was born of the government initiative 'patient power'.
A petition to 10 Downing Street can be signed on http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/SickCharges/
The Senior management of the debt ridden company are so far removed from the front line of their company's operation that they are quite oblivious to the stress they are causing their own staff, as well as patients, nursing and care staff. A point that the editor of the blog made on commercial radio in the North East yesterday.
Patientline's products are difficult to use, the pricing structure is complex and the equipment is very unreliable with spare parts and basic equipment in short supply.
Readers should consider that as they read this piece Patientline staff are being sent over the top, fired up with an incentive of hundreds of pounds of gift vouchers to sell an over priced and unreliable service to sick people.
If the NHS management is not willing to call a halt to Patientline's unacceptable practices then the current situation is one that Gordon Brown should put on his list of changes since Patientline was born of the government initiative 'patient power'.
A petition to 10 Downing Street can be signed on http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/SickCharges/
2 comments:
This will please you peter.
They are restructuring the engineers and will have no static on site engineers. This is because they are taking most of the repairs in house to be fixed at hospitals (that probably dont know that they will be doing all this soldering etc)
3 engineers will cover approx 10k units in the north east and only the units that make money will be repaired as a priority. They are deep in doo doo now with this with an estimated 50% of technical staff willing to walk rather than be used .
All other regions are affected almost the same.
Clearly Patientline is continuing to operated against the interests of their customers; sick people. Clearly there is now an urgent need for the Government to intervene before the discredited company continues to cause even more stress on the wards of British hospitals.
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