Well, this is disturbing. A company called Scitec Inc., which manufactures telephones for hotels and institutions, manufactures a disposable landline telephone for hospitals. Designed to be mounted to a bedrail, it's intended to be used by a single patient, then thrown away—after it has performed its function of generating profit, of course.
"Scitec single-use disposable healthcare telephones and accessories help reduce patient room cross-contamination, cleaning and repair costs," reads the sales sheet, "and increase telecom revenues."
Incredibly, these cost just $13.95—for the hospitals. How much do you reckon they mark them up to the patients?
I’m a lapsed industrial designer. I was born in NYC and figured I’d die there, but a few years ago I abandoned New York to live on a farm in the countryside with my wife. We have six dogs.
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Wasteful Hospital Practices: Disposable Single-Patient-Use Landline Telephones
I would like to think these are provided to patients without a mobile phone. So frequency of use could be very low. If volumes are low, disposable is better than cleaning. They can't be run through an autoclave, so the resources needed to determine you did actually achieved a 3log reduction with a cleaning protocol could very well be more wasteful than disposing of the phone.