A CONTROVERSIAL scheme to charge bedbound hospital patients who want to watch TV or telephone home has been attacked by a union leader.

Hospital patients in the North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Trust area will have to pay a private company for TV access from next month. South Tees Hospital NHS Trust is expected to do the same from next May.

Community and union leaders have criticised the cost to patients who may have to pay more than £20 a week to watch television and 50p a minute to receive incoming calls.

In North Tees and Hartlepool, private company Patientline UK will install TVs, telephones and the Internet at the end of patients' beds at a cost of £2m.

Free TV rooms will remain, but patients will no longer be allowed to bring their own televisions to hospital.

The service will be free to children, but other patients will pay £3.20 a day for TV. Those who have been in hospital for more than two weeks will pay £1.60 a day.

Dave Armstrong, regional officer for health workers' union Unison, said the development was another example of "creeping privatisation" in the NHS.

He said: "This is not frontline health service, but we see this as being unfair on the poorer patients who simply cannot afford to pay £20 a week just to watch the television.

"Why should there be a two-tier service like this? For sick people television can be the only relaxation and distraction they get."

MP for Stockton South, Dari Taylor, said she would raise any concerns voiced about the scheme with the relevant authorities.

A North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Trust spokesman said the initiative was part of the Government's NHS Plan which aims for every major hospital to offer bedside television and telephones by the end of next year.

She said: "As well as improving services for patients, the system will mean less non-clinical work for nurses."

A similar system has been installed at the University Hospital of North Durham, in Durham City, and others are planned for Darlington's Memorial Hospital and Bishop Auckland General.