News location:

Canberra Today 23°/26° | Tuesday, March 19, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Free public Wi-Fi for health care facilities

hierarchy of needs

KATY Gallagher’s love of free wifi marches on with news she’s rolling it out across Canberra’s hospitals and health centres.

The Chief Minister has announced that free public internet access is now available at the Canberra Hospital campus and at Belconnen, Gungahlin and Tuggeranong Community Health Centres.

“Public wireless internet access (Wi-Fi) was switched on across the ACT Health Wi-Fi network, following a successful trial of the service at the Canberra Hospital campus,” Katy said.

“This service links with the Digital Canberra strategy that is helping to stimulate the digital economy across Canberra. Public Wi-Fi is an important step in establishing Canberra as a digital city and will encourage knowledge-based and ICT industries that will help diversify the ACT economy.”

“This is a free service to the public and will enable healthcare consumers and those visiting these locations to use their own Wi-Fi enabled devices to browse the internet and keep up to date with their e-mails.

“Service levels are designed primarily for browsing the internet and accessing e-mails. All internet access will be filtered for appropriateness and is capped at up to 2 megabytes per second, per device,” the Chief Minister said.

“I’m sure this service will improve the experience of consumers, carers and other visitors to these health care facilities, especially if 3G is not enabled on their device. It is all part of delivering the best possible healthcare services experience and enriching public spaces across our health facilities,” the Chief Minister concluded.

One can’t help wonder if getting a staffer to nip out and buy a sim card for the Chief Minister’s iPad wouldn’t be a lot cheaper.

One also wonders if the patients in Canberra Hospital this morning waiting three hours for treatment in emergency according to the live ED activity page wouldn’t have preferred the money and effort be spent on primary health care rather than duplicating their mobile data plan so they can snapchat their anguish for a few cents less.

[Photo by Duncan Hull, attribution licence]

Who can be trusted?

In a world of spin and confusion, there’s never been a more important time to support independent journalism in Canberra.

If you trust our work online and want to enforce the power of independent voices, I invite you to make a small contribution.

Every dollar of support is invested back into our journalism to help keep citynews.com.au strong and free.

Become a supporter

Thank you,

Ian Meikle, editor

Share this

Leave a Reply

Follow us on Instagram @canberracitynews