A rant about our new pagers

Our hospital is moving to a new (physical) pager system. The old pager wasn't encrypted which is a no no from a HIPAA standpoint, so it's understandable. These new pagers though are not it. They're big, bulky and they don't have all the alert options that our old pagers had. Our old pagers had the option of having a "vibrate then ring" alert. So it would vibrate first, and if you didn't look at the pager in time, it would transition to a ring. The new ones only give you the option of vibrating or ringing. Seems like a minor difference, but here's why it's important and so annoying that the new ones can't do the transitional alert.

As neurosurgery residents, we are CONSTANTLY paged. One time I asked the operator to count how many pages I had gotten in a 6 hour period and it totaled to over 220. That's over 36 pages an hour or a page about every 90 seconds. Sometimes I would max out the pager because there were just too many incoming pages at once. This is an average. So as you can imagine, having that high pitched beep go off every 1-2 minutes would drive any person insane. Thus, that's where putting it on vibrate comes in handy.

But the only problem with the vibrate only alert is that come 2am when you finally have that rare moment of rest, you shut your eyes and fall into a deep slumber. You're so exhausted that you're completely knocked out, even if it's only for a couple of minutes. You're going to miss that vibration only alert. Not all pages are important, but missing an emergent one can be literally life or death for a patient on a neurosurgery service. That's when having the pager transition into that jarring beep is actually helpful to wake you up.

These new pagers can't do that. That's why they're bad. Nothing like people who don't actually use pagers (hospital admin) getting crap pagers for people who actually do have to use them on a regular basis (us). Frustrating. Another example of admin having no idea how actually working in the hospital and patient care works but getting to call the shots. It's their world, we're just living in it. I realize this is a bit dramatic...oh well.