Doctor's offices in Paget have been left fuming about a phone outage that has left patients struggling to get through for days.

The Point Finger Road Medical Centre said its phones went down on Thursday and BTC had failed to get them working since.

Yesterday all three external lines were down, although the line to the hospital was still working, The Royal Gazette understands.

A spokeswoman said: "They said they couldn't do anything about it because of the weather."

But she said the weather had been superb over the weekend but nothing had been done to fix the damage caused by a pole fire.

"It's unacceptable. It's been a serious inconvenience."

Yesterday a BTC spokeswoman blamed the problem on a burnt telephone cable caused by an electrical fire which is the responsibility of Belco.

"As BTC workers attempted to repair service they were hampered by heavy rains yesterday," the spokeswoman said.

She said the cable was being replaced and the service should be working today.

"BTC has been in close contact, with both residential and business customers, some of whom were doctors, to assure them repairs will be done as quickly as possible."

She said the outage in the Point Finger Road and Astwood Estate area had affected around 40 customers and the company apologised for the inconvenience.

Dr. Stephen Sherwin's practice in Hamilton was also affected by a partial phone outage in the early part of last week which was fixed by Friday.

A spokeswoman said: "We heard through the grapevine that someone had knocked one of the wires.

"It was a major inconvenience. We have three lines - two regular lines and an internal line to the hospital.

"It was the third line which had a problem. We had to use one of the other ones to get through so we only had one line coming in. We had a lot of difficulties."

The phone outage has also affected PALS with Ann Smith Gordon, president of the organisation asking the public to contact them by a cellular phone number.

Their main number, 236-7257, is not in service.

"It's desperate for our patients to be able to reach us... We don't know when they will be back up," Ms Smith said.

Ms Smith expressed concern for over 100 at-home patients and that doctors and new referrals who would not be able to contact the organisation.

"I do want to apologise to those people who are trying to reach us. They're getting a peculiar answering machine message that really has nothing to do with us... If they get any such message ring the cell until we get the phone back."

Ms Gordon asked anyone trying to reach PALS to call 237-3430 instead.