No long distance for patients?

[MunoRN]

My hospital gets about a quarter of our patients from areas that are considered long distance calls from the hospital. My hospital does not allow patients to use their bedside phones to call long distance. I've worked at one other hospital where long distance was free to patients (except overseas calls), so this seems a bit ridiculous to me, but maybe it's more common than I think. Is this the norm?

[monkeybug]

Yep, very common. At several hospitals I've seen nurses do this: the patient legitimately needs to make a long distance call. Nurse goes to the desk and calls, and then transfers the call to the patient's room. I don't know if administration would approve, but sometimes patients really, really needed to make these calls, and there wasn't a better option.

[classicdame, MSN, EdD]

phoning is a convenience, not a necessity. Surely someone in the family can bring a cell phone to the patient, or get a burner at Walmart. I do not agree that it is a "right" to expect someone else to pick up this expense.

[MunoRN, RN]

phoning is a convenience, not a necessity. Surely someone in the family can bring a cell phone to the patient, or get a burner at Walmart. I do not agree that it is a "right" to expect someone else to pick up this expense.

I'd agree that sometimes patients have other options, but do you really think that's always the case? Very few things are actually a necessity, being able to communicate with family when ill, potentially on the verge of death, isn't a necessity, but I do think facilitating that is a pretty basic part of patient advocacy.

While the "room charge" for inpatients is pretty vague, it runs between about $1,000 and $3,000/day, so I'd argue that you can't claim they aren't paying for things like phone access.

So back to my patient who, as it turns out, was denied the opportunity to talk to her husband one last time, you'd argue there's nothing wrong with that?

[michigansapphire]

phoning is a convenience, not a necessity. Surely someone in the family can bring a cell phone to the patient, or get a burner at Walmart. I do not agree that it is a "right" to expect someone else to pick up this expense.

And how is the patient supposed to reach their family member to ask for a cell phone without phoning them?

I work at a rural hospital. Many of our patients live an hour or more from our facility, and the family may not have reliable transportation or gas money to come visit.