Alternative for mobile phone

[TigerJen]

Hi all. Hoping someone can help me on here. My younger sister has learning difficulties - her physical age is 27 but her mental age is approx 7. She is living locally in assisted living accommodation to give her her independence. She's been living there for just over 4 years. We gave her a mobile phone when she moved there so she would be able to contact us in emergencies or just to stay in contact. She has over the last few months developed a problem where she calls one of us and if we don't pick up, she calls repeatedly until we do. Her record currently stands at 41 missed calls in 30 mins. She also backs this up with text after text - we get approx 3 minutes to reply and if we don't then we get the same text every 3 minutes until we do. We've had repeated conversations with her where she gets upset and promises to not do it again and then a week or so later she's back doing it. We've asked her carers to take the phone off her when she's in the house but with it being assisted living, she does have lots of independence so takes her phone with her every else. Can anyone think of anything else we could do? We tried PAYG and she ran out of credit in 2 days and we also tried reducing her pay monthly contract down to few minutes and texts but both ultimately result in her having no means to contact us when the credit/minutes/messages run out which defeats the object of her having a phone. Are there any devices other than mobiles we could give to her? Can the network help us? Has anyone had this problem before and how else would you tackle it? TIA

You need to put this in chat

You may need to work out why she is calling and tackle the underlying problem.
Is she ringing for a chat because she is bored or lonely?
Is she reporting a problem that she doesn't know how to solve?
Are the carers doing all the tasks necessary or is she ringing to ask for something that they could easily be doing?

I would get yourself a separate phone for her to ring, then either ring her at set times or let her ring you and then, when you have spoken to her, tell her that you will be turning the phone off until x time (if she can't tell the time then go by something that happens regularly like the carer calling or a TV programme she watches).

If she might need you in a medical emergency, then get her an emergency lifeline button - give them your regular phone number so you can still be contacted in an emergency.