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The most expensive phones in the world

by Whaleoil on March 5, 2010

I am staggered, even when me and my mates were selling phone systems we never did a deal as spectacularly good for the sales person and bad for the customer as the “deal” that Telecom has been extorting from the DHBs.

Telecom is scrambling to offer health providers alternatives to its beleaguered XT network as a third district health board confirms it is considering dropping its contract.

The Dominion Post reported yesterday that Hutt Valley and Capital & Coast district health boards had asked to switch to another network, saying the problems with XT were putting patients at risk if on-call doctors could not be contacted.

Capital & Coast would not say how much its 341-phone contract is worth, but Hutt Valley’s 49-phone contract is more than $1 million.

Fuck me dead, that is astounding! I was trying to figure it out, even over five years it’s still an average phone bill of $340 per month.

If I was Tony Ryall I would seriously, seriously be looking very closely at the rorting that Telecom is conducting inside the health Sector. Another area worth rattling the cage over is the exorbitant costs associated with the Health Intranet. When you have got the officials bullshit explanation as to why THI is so expensive, give me a call and I’ll translate it for you.

There are literally millions to be saved just in communications.

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  • mediatart

    Most likely all their communication business is $1 mill pa. But you would be right that there would be some strange spending in DHBs.
    But it works the other way sometimes, a leading multinational( no longer in NZ) quoted $150,000 for a payroll migration which went to about 0.5 mill, and they had to wear it. And that was about 12 years ago

  • Rob

    Do they really care how much it costs the price is simply passed onto the Taxpayer. If you think politicians have a sense of entitlement it pails into insignificant when you see what our health professionals think they are entitled to. What we are not allowed to see is the breakdown of the total coast for our Health system say on a cost per operation basis. The deal is probably so good that they can afford to incur a bit of cost to keep the contract long term. Mr and Mrs average are probably not being given the same opportunity.

  • Anne

    Yup, no surprise there.

    There’s money for management salaries and carparks, money for office support staff for management, money for poor contract choices like this one – and the frontline nursing and medical staff get screwed. Like the surgeon who resigned from Capital Coast Health after having to park 3 blocks from the hospital at 2am when called in. The thing is, the last thing he would have passed before going in the staff door of the emergency department would have been a line of covered car parks reserved 24h for management. In 2 years in the ED at WPH I never saw a car in them after 6pm.

  • Grizz

    @Ann

    Hospital Managers exist for the benefit of Hospital Managers. You should see the troughers at the Waikato DHB.

  • owk

    The access costs for the Health Intranet are exhorbitant. It’s a dodgy old VPN that is based on Healthlink issued practitioner and router digital certificates that cost an arm and a leg, and the network doesn’t even have DNS. Whenever anyone threatens Healthlink’s monopoly, they go running to the media screaming that MOH are threatening the security of private health information.

    Which is all pretty bad. Except MOH have been planning a replacement called Connected Health that is bigger, more complicated, and more expensive. It doesn’t address any of the technical deficiencies of the old network and is still based on the same digital certificates that are hated by the health sector. The project has been running for 3 or 4 years now, hasn’t delivered anything, and will be obsolete at birth if it ever does make it in to production.

  • Brian Smaller

    Whale – I would be asking what morons signed off ont hat deal? Telecom are out to make money. Can’t fault them for that.

  • giblet

    Michael Swann the ex head of IT at the Otago Health Board is in prison for accepting bribes from IT companies wanting the Health Board contract.

    Someone should look at the Wellington Health Board to see if there is anything amiss with this Telecom contract.

  • mediatart

    Giblet, Swann wasnt accepting bribes, that was accomplice , he was diverting IT spending for ficticious service contracts, the companies were of his own creation of that of an accomplice.
    But of course they were shoveling the money out the door for IT anyway so had no idea that hardware had become cheaper so could have been saving money.
    I wondered why at the time Swann was happy to stick with what he had before Y2K

  • giblet

    mediatart – you haven’t kept up with Swann’s criminal offending.

    He pleaded guilty three months ago to accepting $755,000 in bribes from an old school chum in return for awarding Hospital IT Helpdesk support contracts to his friend’s company.

    Read the story here:

    http://www.nzherald.co.nz/dunedin/news/article.cfm?l_id=198&objectid=10616251

  • Bullet

    Ok – in my darker days I works for a council and we were on Vodafone – I was field based and my average monthly phone bill was around $150.00. The decision was made to switch to telecom because we could piggy back on some central government deal and all of a sudden our phone bills dropped to $20 odd dollars. So if councils can get that sort of deal I am sure DHB can to.

  • Robert

    Who wants Vodaphone anyway. hopeless coverage and constatntly dropping calls. Around Tauranga. Flat land.
    I’ll be back to telecom. Never had that trouble before.

  • troisiemegauche

    x

  • peterwn

    I know a junior doctor whose ancient prepay CDMA cell phone was inherited from his late grandmother. Does the job quite OK.

  • Rach

    Prehaps if the staff had to pay for any personal useage on the plans then the amount would be reduced. Lots of companies have a policy like that for mobile phones that are provided to their staff, because in cases where they dont people just use them for all their personal stuff and use a lot more than they would if they were paying for it. I mean if I made a call to outer mongolia from the land line while working as it has no toll bar, you can bet they would look into it and probably send me the bill.