Guest Kirsteen Posted July 6, 2004 Report Share Posted July 6, 2004 Hi there, Since I'm going to need to rearrange my telecommunication services, I'm thinking about my communication needs and how they may be best met. One device that I've never tried using is a pager; however, I know some undergrads who have them, as well as first and second year medical students. Can anyone share some insights re: the pros of using a pager versus a cellphone? Also, are there any advantages to having both, a pager and a cellphone? Cheers, Kirsteen Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Elaine I Posted July 6, 2004 Report Share Posted July 6, 2004 Hi Kirsteen, While I'm not a med student (yet?), I do have a pager. I find it very handy. Since when I'm with patients, I can't answer the phone, people can still get a message to me. (Often I work very odd hours - ie: shiftwork, so getting a hold of me can be difficult at times.) Also, cell phones can't be used inside hospitals, which makes pagers advantageous. I still do have (and carry with me) a cell phone, but I use it more for outgoing calls. BTW, I'm fortunate to have an alpha-numeric pager, so I get the message before I return the calls. I would recommend this option if it is affordable. (I don't know the cost, as my pager is supplied by my employer.) It's nice to know from the pager message (rather than just a number) how urgent the message is. Just my opinion, Elaine Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Kirsteen Posted July 6, 2004 Report Share Posted July 6, 2004 Thanks for that, Elaine. It sound as though the alphanumeric pagers are a little more costly, then? Cheers, Kirsteen Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Elaine I Posted July 6, 2004 Report Share Posted July 6, 2004 I believe they are more expensive. However, to me, the value is worth it. (Of course, it is easy to say that when you aren't actually paying anything for it!!) If you opt not to go with alpha-numeric, it may be worth it to at least have voice mail on your pager. Personally, I don't like calling someone back saying, "I don't know who you are, but you paged me." I never give out the 10 digit phone number for my pager for that reason. For an alpha-numeric pager, people are given a 1-800 number to call, and then enter in a five digit access code. A live operator then types in the message. Elaine Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Ian Wong Posted July 7, 2004 Report Share Posted July 7, 2004 I think a pager is largely superfluous outside the medical profession, and maybe if you're a realtor or a drug dealer or something. If someone pages you and you either want to check that message, or call them back, you still need access to a phone. Having a cell phone is just so much more convenient if you're trying to play phone tag with someone, or are trying to arrange a meeting time with other people, or just in general find yourself in any public area without ready access to a pay phone. A cell phone with caller-id and tuned to vibrate-mode only is essentially a pager, after all. Having said that, pagers are still the ball and chain of the senior medical student and everyone beyond. Pagers have much more reliable reception than cell phones, particularly deep within the bowels of the hospital. They are also purportedly "safer" because they do not broadcast radio waves, and therefore have zero risk of affecting nearby medical monitoring equipment. Still, I haven't heard of any reliable information that today's lower powered digital cell phones can actually affect medical equipment, unless you are somehow dumb enough to place your Motorola's antenna directly over someone's pacemaker! I've even seen anesthesiologists answer their cell phones while in the middle of a case in the OR, probably the most tightly monitored part of the hospital aside from the various ICU's and CCU's. Ian Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Kirsteen Posted July 7, 2004 Report Share Posted July 7, 2004 Hi there, So it appears that the hot aspect of pagers is their safety then? In that regard, it seems that a pager would be a bit superfluous during the preclinical years of medical school, yes? :rolleyes Thanks for your input. Kirsteen Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest UWOMED2005 Posted July 12, 2004 Report Share Posted July 12, 2004 I can't think of anyone who had a pager in years 1 + 2. In clerkship, you're provided with a pager on the rotations where you need it. Ask most students and they'd probably want to get rid of the pager they have, rather than go looking for another one, :rollin A personal pager wouldn't be linked to the hospital switchboard, so wouldn't be useful for clerkship per se. The one exception would be if you were extremely keen on one particular specialty and bought a pager to give the number to get in on off-hours action (ie asking the plastics people to call you at 2am to go in for any cool craniofacial trauma.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest moo Posted July 18, 2004 Report Share Posted July 18, 2004 You won't need a pager during your pre-clinical years. I used to carry a pager when I worked on call at my previous hospital job because it was more reliable than a cell phone. And pagers were very popular back in high school in the 90s. However, they are largely out of style now. The pager I carry now is a big huge alpha numeric pager but I still carry a cell phone. Pagers are useless outside the hospital. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest opiedog Posted December 18, 2004 Report Share Posted December 18, 2004 Our local hospital bans the use of cell phones inside the building due to the effect it might have on monitoring/support systems. You might want to check with the facility you are heading to (signs are posted all over ours) as to whether or not you can use a cell inside, which forces your option of using a pager. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest endingsoon Posted December 18, 2004 Report Share Posted December 18, 2004 All hospitals officially ban them for that stupid reason, but everyone uses them in the hospital. I cannot for the life of me remember someone walking upto a doctor and telling him to turn off his cell phone. Patients and families yes, but we are largely exempt from that rule. As for a pager during your preclerkship, it almost brings a laugh to me face. Why would you want it? Its not like its a fun thing to have and you will get your fill in clerkship. Preclerkship is just like undergrad, you haev no patient duties and you are unimportant because you can't do anything. No one is going to be paging you for anything urgent that can't wait. A lot of undergrad students have pagers just because it is a cool way to keep in touch with your friends and stuff. Its largely for show, having your pager go off makes eveyrone look at you and envy your popularity. If you really think you need to show off in front of your classmates then go ahead and get one, otherwise just count the days until clerkship: from then on, you will hate the sight of it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Ian Wong Posted December 18, 2004 Report Share Posted December 18, 2004 ...from then on, you will hate the sight of it.Last night as we got the dreaded 6:00 am admission (is there any worse kind???), me and my ICU resident were busy doing some serious pager-hating... It's never a good sign seeing the ED number flash up on your pager. Ian Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest DrSahsi Posted December 19, 2004 Report Share Posted December 19, 2004 I think a pager is largely superfluous outside the medical profession, and maybe if you're a realtor or a drug dealer or something. In clerkship, the "work" pagers that were given out were rotation-specific. If you were no longer on call, you physically handed the pager to the person who was. So I went out and got my own personal pager as well... a really small, cheap Motorola so friends and family could get a hold of me at the hospital if necessary... without having to have a copy of the call schedule handy. During my final evaluation for my psychiatry rotation, my preceptor -- with whom I worked very closely for six weeks -- decided to ask me about my "other" pager, and whether it was for any "extracurricular activites" or "business dealings." He said this with exactly the same tone he employed when talking to his patients about their substance abuse. I just want to know why it took him six weeks of staring at me and my personal pager day in and day out to finally ask me (more or less) if I was dealing goodies after work. Geez... Now I'm happily in a line of medical work that is pager-free, but I still grimace and wince when I hear other pagers go off. You'll learn to hate them, and it's something that is very VERY hard to unlearn. [-RSS] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest jmh2005 Posted December 31, 2004 Report Share Posted December 31, 2004 I couldn't agree more with Dr.S and Ian. I very happily gave up my pager the week before last, as I am officially done my clerkship with only 8 weeks of electives to go. You will learn to greatly dislike your pager...I can't fathome getting 'extra' pages on top of the regular pager you will get when you are doing clinical work. Treasure the silence while you have it, just my two cents. All the best Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest UWOMED2005 Posted December 31, 2004 Report Share Posted December 31, 2004 Yeah, the more I think about it, the more I want to ask if anyone has any thoughts on how to get rid of the pagers you're supposed to carry. . . without getting busted for tampering with your pager, of course. That would be an interesting thread. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest 007 Posted December 31, 2004 Report Share Posted December 31, 2004 People are always amazed when they find out I don't have a cell phone or pager. I'm not in meds yet, but I decided a long time ago not to get anything now and enjoy the peace and quiet while I can. :rollin Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest melinda75 Posted January 3, 2005 Report Share Posted January 3, 2005 Hi everyone, I currently work on the IT field (another legal use of pagers on the job) and am part of an oncall rotation schedule. I have to carry a pager 24/7 for 1-2 weeks in case servers go down in the middle of the night. One of my coworkers has a three year old and she figured out that when "Daddy's" pager went off, that he had to go into work. She took it when he wasn't looking and flushed it down the toilet! Just figured that I'd share that funny story with everyone. I don't recommend flushing pagers though. Melinda P.S. I hope that nobody minds me posting in the "preclinical years" forum. I'm still a few years away from even applying to med schools. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest UWOMED2005 Posted January 4, 2005 Report Share Posted January 4, 2005 That's awesome. Now all I need is a 3 year old as smart as that. . . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest not rex morgan Posted January 7, 2005 Report Share Posted January 7, 2005 At UBC, we had to buy our own pagers, and pay for the monthly usage fee. Some schools, or most as it seems, supply them. As Dr. Sashi put it, if you are exchanging pagers all the time, it might be adventagious to get your own pager (IFF you are in a position to be in the hospital. I agree, I can't fathom a use for them in pre-clinical years, unless it's not medically-related). I never looked into alphanumeric pagers and fees b/c I really don't plan on spending any more money on this than I need to. The cheapo number-only pagers work just fine. It's pretty standard to return a page by saying "hi this is___, MSI. I just got a page." If it's a member of your team, they will likely double-page you (ie, put their local in twice), so you know it's a "friendly page." Some schools lease pagers out to you for the clinical year. You will not need anything else. I know I did an elective in Calgary, where they do this. The Electives Office, as well as the office of the faculty I was doing an elective in could not understand why I would be calling them to borrow a pager, so I don't know if these loaned pagers work in other provinces. Mine didn't and that's why I needed it in theirs. As for getting rid of pagers, one of the guys in my class was tempted on a night where the calls from the ward were particularly "soft," and frequent to accidently leave his pager at the nurses station. He would claim that he was just on the ward so much, he must have left it up there while he was rushing. There's also the added satisfaction of someone paging you for something that can wait, paging themselves repeatedly. (legal disclaimer...this was merely sleep-deprived fantasy rant, and nothing any responsible MSI would ever do...in fact I imagine that not only would important pages get missed, you would fail your rotation or get kicked out of med school). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest moo Posted January 8, 2005 Report Share Posted January 8, 2005 The only people that page my pager are friends and residents/interns. Reminds me so much of the high school days. However, we do carry admitting pagers, and on surgery, when we're on call we carry our own pagers plus a trauma or SICU pager. Those actually go off for important things and we just hand them from one oncall team to the next. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest leviathan Posted February 15, 2005 Report Share Posted February 15, 2005 That's not entirely true. The Royal Columbian hospital in BC used to have a no-cell phone policy, but it has since been removed since studies have shown that the new cell phones have no effect on any medical equipment. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest endingsoon Posted February 15, 2005 Report Share Posted February 15, 2005 Yeah I mean I use my cell phone all the time and so do a lot of other doctors and stuff. No one has ever come up to me and asked me to stop using it, while I have seen a lot of patients being asked to stop using theirs. I think if you are wearing scrubs/lab coat people just leave you alone and let you talk. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Ian Wong Posted August 7, 2005 Report Share Posted August 7, 2005 Floating back to the top. Ian Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Ian Wong Posted June 29, 2006 Report Share Posted June 29, 2006 Floating to the top... Ian Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
whoithinkyouare Posted October 2, 2006 Report Share Posted October 2, 2006 If I was accepted to UBC, and I got a place off campus, would it be beneficial to just have a cell phone and scrap the home-phone? Does anybody do this? I've heard some of the carriers had unlimited local calling in Vancouver - like a landline... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kirsteen Posted October 2, 2006 Report Share Posted October 2, 2006 Hi there, I know a few folks who have gotten rid of their home phones in favour of a mobile. There are a number of different plans out there, including the Canada One plans where you can make an inordinate number of long distance calls in Canada for one flat fee. Cheers, Kirsteen Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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