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The UK's Health Service Told To Ditch 'Outdated' Pagers (bbc.com)
The UK's NHS has been told to stop using pagers for communications by 2021, in order to save money. The health service still uses about 130,000 pagers, which is about 10% of the total left in use globally. From a report: They cost the NHS about $8.6 million a year, because only one service provider supports them. Health Secretary Matt Hancock called them "outdated" and said he wanted to rid the NHS of "archaic technology like pagers and fax machines". However, many in the medical industry say that pagers are quick and reliable - especially in emergencies -- and proposed replacements have their own shortcomings.
They should keep the pagers, absolutely. The reason is this:
Pagers use slow transmission protocols that do not need a huge S/N to be properly decoded. That means pagers are going to work almost everywhere you would otherwise get an annoying "No Service" notification on your phone, such as elevators, parking garages, basements, and so on.
It would be a blunder of gargantuan proportions to stop using pagers for critical messaging. Just because the mobile carriers want to take over the pager spectrum for 5G doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.
sounds like an ideal app for a smartwatch
Nullius in verba
They have a coverage like you would not believe and ALWAYS work! The only drawback is that they do not work for dick picks, if you are into that sort of thing.
But that's only $66 US per year. If all you need yo do is contact someone to call or come in, that's way cheaper than providing phones to employees.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Everybody and I mean EVERYBODY knows pagers are going to make a big come back in 2019!
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
That's a bargain. Really, can't do much lower than that with any technology these days that results in a monthly fee.
Captcha: monthly (Dang, why are they are so creepily relevant to my comments?)
Pagers don't emit cellphone-level radiation & electrical interference around medical devices.
Pages have a weak acknowledge capability. Meanwhile you can't leave your cellphone by a radio. The interference it causes to the radio is the same interference it may cause in a medical device. And it may not cause a malfunction that gets noticed. What if the morphine drop was increased by a random flipped bit.
Medical devices are not evaluated in cellphone conditions. And given that doctors work in the immediate vicinity of medial equipment it is a risk the hospital is not willing to take.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
The only problem with pagers is that they are unencrypted. what GP stated is absolutely accurate. The low VHF has great BLOS capabilities (why the cell phone companies want to stop supporting it) and consequently the pagers seem to work everywhere in the hospital except inside the MRI room. Cell coverage in concrete buildings is spotty, and the only significant improvement by ditching pagers is carrying one device instead of two.
I have several customers in our area including hospitals that have their own private paging systems. The spectrum is licensed and dedicated to their use. The are only designed to work with-in their facilities, which in the case of hospital staff, is mainly where they need the quick response. Outside the facilities then standard phone calls, text messaging can be used to call someone in.
The major downside is the support of the infrastructure to keep the system running, but with regular maintenance it's not that big of an ask.
In addition to being cheaper than mobile phones, they also make more efficient use of radio bandwidth, have better reception (with fewer transmission towers) and have a battery life that smartphones (hell even feature phones) can only dream of.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Very reliable very convenient and nonintrusive.
Everybody was pretending to go for a break today to listen to this https://youtu.be/wNd2bvLvyk4
Most of them on their smart phones watched the Facebook version https://www.facebook.com/theto...
He has become a celebrity in the U.K., i had to go to laundry at the end of the ward with a patient's laptop and patient.
Patients are allowed laptops these days they put them on their beds raise it up into the sitting position and use their wireless.
But we are not allowed a smartphone or laptop on ward so we befriend a patient.
If they want to get rid of outdated things, then why not look at some of the treatments which haven changed in decades? If something works better than the alternatives then it should be kept, regardless of whether it has flashing lights and pretty buttons on it.
Paging Dr. Allcome!
This was a while ago (about 15 I would say) and I managed the IT service desk for a large bank. We used pagers and the ticket system paged on various events. They were necessarily cryptic but the intention was to let the right people know when stuff was going on. The CTO would get paged if email went down, that kind of thing.
It was the dawn of the not-so-smart phone era and the executives got them along with people getting their own flip phones and such. Texting was starting to build. It was a great new world on the horizon. And the executives wanted us to step boldly into it.
Every few months I was asked why we didn't switch away from those old fashioned pagers and use this marvelous new technology. No more cryptic messages! No need to carry two devices! Stop being stuck in the past and move with the times!
I would politely listen to them and tell them (again) that SMS relied on email to get the messages to the towers. So just how I was I going to send a message that email was down if .. I used a system that depended on email to send messages?
It kept happening for years but that TAPI system just kept chugging along and the pagers worked everywhere, even in the more remote areas of the states when cell reception was 'stand on a hill and point your phone in the right direction' level.
It's nowhere near as important as medical professionals needing to be paged but it's an object lesson in using the right tool for the job. In this case the pager system is unlikely to get overloaded when there's a crisis or some other event where everyone is on their mobile phones. It might seem like it's an unnecessary expense but I'm guessing they looked at it like the executives at my bank did - a cost without knowing the value behind it.
I once thought pagers were useless and outdated, but they'll get a message through to you in lots of places that a cellphone simply will not work, like parking garages.
It seems to be an inexpensive solution to a real problem. I want a heart surgeon or first responder to get their messages NO MATTER WHAT.
The pager service could technically be done much cheaper today by the use of LPWAN. This would enable easy competition between LPWAN providers.
Someone "just" has to fund the development of the new devices.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Pagers are the near perfect answer to the needs of medical workers, and very affordable - $5.5/month per user, or about 20ÃÂ/day.
The devices are quicker, more reliable than cellphones, and as a mature technology, costs are fairly trivial.
This politician's entire argument is based on ignorance of the problem, the technology involved, and the low cost of the current solution - it needs to be replaced because it's 'ancient', nothing more.
Think NHS can build an 'app' and roll it out for less than $8.5M? What will be the on-going cost to keep the required app servers up 24x7, with 5 mines of availability (99.999% up-time)?
The $8.5M is cheap, the technology is great, and there is no problem.
Ken
Encountered that at my work. Maybe not life saving, but they transitioned our network/computer help desk to VOIP. What happens when the network goes down?
I mean, we were aware of the issue, but we couldn't reach out to our higher level/vendor supports for assistance, or to our lower level customers to let them know that we were aware of the issue and working on it.
I don't read AC A human right
Why not just put the same hardware technology a pager uses INSIDE the phone? I'm sure Apple or Samsung could easily incorporate Pager radio silicon in their phones.
No?
user@host$ diff
Folks in hospitals and first responders that I know have pagers often hand the pager to the next person or whoever is filling in for them. This enables system/managment to simply page on-call pager and reach whoever has it. If switching to phonecalls, or phoneapp, then someone/thing has to be constantly updated to know who to contact.
There are a number of places where cell-phone are prohibited, but one-way incoming pagers are allowed. Switching to cell-phone/app would make those area dark/off-limits/blind-spots.
I used to carry a pager for almost 15 years when I was part of our state emergency service in NSW.
The reason we still use them is because of coverage.
Pagers rely on radio transmitters that cover massive areas. They are not subject to emergency mobile signal shutdown during emergencies or congestion periods.
SMS (and email) is much more useful, and we use that as our primary mass communication tool to our members, however, for team leaders and officers we still use pagers as well.
I have had situations where an emergency SMS was not delivered for over an hour due to the fire emergency we were in.
This is not to say that pagers are perfect. I have had missed or garbled messages due to interference (I was working near a phone exchange at the time).
I think pagers are still useful, the problem is the number of providers is shrinking rapidly and that will be the only reason they will disappear.
faxes!
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.