You may not be able to put a price on health, but you can put a price on the cost of using a hospital bedside phone, and this price is too high. There is a risk that if a patient’s illness doesn’t fell him, the shock of reading his hospital phone bill will.

Patientline, the company that dominates this market, has caused palpitations by raising the cost of making calls from hospital beds by 160 per cent, to 26p a minute. Calling a patient costs up to 49p a minute. By way of compensation, Patientline is trimming the tariff for its bedside tel-evisions, the service used by 70 per cent of those who spend money with the firm, to £2.90 a day.

Patientline might cite mitigating factors. It has a millstone of debt around its neck, having invested £160 million on installing its system at 75,000 bedsides (while not being able to recoup any of this from hospital IT projects, as it had been promised by the Government). Also, an Ofcom inquiry into the dizzy cost of bedside phoning laid the blame not on gouging by the providers of such services, but on the “complex web of government policy and agreements made between the providers, the NHS and individual NHS trusts” (although it suggested that many hospitals banned mobile phones because of pressure from the companies operating their bedside phone services).

It is time this ban on mobile phones was lifted, and patients’ tongues liberated. The Department of Health believes mobiles can be used safely in hospitals, echoing a report in the British Medical Journalthat worries about using mobiles in hospitals were built on mythical safety concerns. Doctors routinely use their mobiles on wards.

Patientline may have been badly treated by the NHS, but patients deserve better treatment.