IT HAS been a bruising six months for Derek Lewis, chairman of Patientline, the company that provides bedside phones in more than 150 hospitals. Yesterday Mr Lewis saw the departure of the third chief executive of his chairmanship, after an attack on Mr Lewis’s leadership by rebel shareholders. As chairman since 1998 he has also outlasted two finance directors.
Last month Patientline had a narrow escape when Ofcom, the telecoms regulator, said that the company was not profiteering when it charged patients and relatives high rates to use bedside telephones. It emerged last July that Patientline charged callers 39p a minute off-peak and 49p at other times. Ofcom said that the charges were a result of “government policy and agreements made between the providers, the NHS and individual NHS trusts”.
A former director-general of the Prison Service, Mr Lewis is best known as the topic of a Jeremy Paxman television interview. Mr Paxman asked Michael Howard, then the Home Secretary, 14 times whether he had overruled Mr Lewis over the sacking of a prison governor.