Experienced hospital visitors will know that the most welcome gift to the bedridden isn't grapes, flowers, or chocolates. It's a great clanking sack full of change to feed the hungry ward payphone, wheeled to the bedside after much begging and pleading by a hard-pressed nurse with an "I've got better things to do" look on her or his face.

That's all about to change. Above my bed in the Queen Elizabeth hospital in Woolwich, London - one of Britain's newest - is something called Patientline. It looks like a cross between a phone, a laptop and an in-flight TV. It's fed by cards rather than coins. It's an all-in-one TV, phone, answering machine and radio. And I love and loathe it in equal measure.

I love it because I can phone anybody, at any time I like. The cost of phoning out is below BT payphone rates. So family and friends get graphic health updates as well as requests for fruit, socks, books, moral support etc. I can even record an answering machine message for people who call me while I'm being x-rayed or having physiotherapy. To phone me costs a wacking 50p a minute, the same sort of price you'd pay for the Test score or a weather bulletin. And as I'm officially on a premium line, I can't be phoned from abroad. I can phone abroad, but on the experience of one call to the US, this costs an arm and a leg, which under current circumstances are in short supply.

All in all though, I feel pleasantly connected. A long phone call is, in many cases, as good as a visit both for me and the person I've telephoned. And I can feed the beast via the Patientline operator using a credit card. So far, having been in for 10 days, I've spent nearly £25. It has gone wrong only once, and an engineer based at the hospital arrived promptly and fixed it. The radio is great too, with BBC Radio 1, 2, 3 and 4 and Capital FM in high quality headphone stereo. Certainly enough choice for me. And radio is free.

However, Patientline is relentlessly commercial. Although I've opted not to pay the hefty £3.50 a day for TV, which includes ITV digital services (half-price for over 60s) the screen can't be switched off. It self-advertises 24-hours a day. My least favourite ad is the one offering a free legal helpline for accident victims. This is ambulance chasing, and speaking as an accident victim I find it tactless. And though I can turn the screen away from me at night I can't turn it off. It flashes eerily at the wall until the sleeping pill kicks in. And promptly at 8am it unceremoniously switches off my radio and tunes me in to an hour of promotional free TV.

I'd like to report that the NHS makes a tidy sum for every Patientline unit it allows into its hospitals, but I can't. The NHS gains nothing financially from the 15,000 Patientline units installed in 22 hospitals. I think they have missed a trick.

This, though is the future of hospital telephones. Mobile phones will always pose a danger to electronic medical equipment. Nursing staff can no longer be expected to be phone wallahs. Free TV on the NHS is a thing of the past. The next generation of Patientline units will have full internet access for users and will allow medical staff to access patient records at the bedside.

But excuse me now, my phone's ringing.