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The UK's Health Service Told To Ditch 'Outdated' Pagers (bbc.com)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 Health Secretary Matt Hancock called them "outdated" and said he wanted to rid the NHS of "archaic technology like pagers and fax machines".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.
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
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.
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Sure, let's make our emergency services rely on something that's delicate that needs constant battery recharging to work.
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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.
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.
Most pagers I know of still use AA batteries. Why? Rechargables just don't last as long!
They literally will last for months on a single AA battery. A busy pager may last a month (one that's constantly beeping and vibrating). Off a single AA battery.
But one that isn't so busy can probably go up to a year on a single AA battery.
Yes but what data needs to be encrypted? In this use case, most pagers at best send short messages like phone numbers or text like “Call ER”. I suppose patient information could be sent but rarely do hospitals do that preferring for voice communication because a conversation is far more effective.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Getting rid of outdated pagers, such as more. Use a modern pager such as less because it offers many features.that the UK Health Service might find useful. However 'less' is not useful for sending those picts you mention which might be an important bit of information about the patient's health.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
But if the person already has a working smart phone, what's the point? They are going to keep the smart phone charged anyway. And if they are out of cell phone range in this day and age paging them isn't likely to be of much value. By the time they run back down the mountain to use the phone in the small town pub the emergency is over since some doctor near the hospital with a smart phone already responded.
Naw, you'd be surprised how crap cell phone coverage can be even in this day and age. Remember hospitals have to work even with degraded service, and if the cell tower near you goes down for some reason you may have 3 bars of 3G coverage for a while instead. Works fine, but go one floor down into the basement and you're at no signal (whereas a pager will get through fine).
That brings up the other importance: Eliminating common failure modes. If you only have one way of reaching your life-saving employee, dependent on one network and one tech layer, you're not doing safety-critical reliability engineering properly.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Even with the really amazing battery-saving techniques used in modern smartphones, you can burn through a full battery in a day of call if it's busy enough. Maybe you leave your charger at home by accident and, through a series of odd events, end up stuck at the hospital all day and night. In theory, I could be stuck there from 7 AM Friday to 7 AM Monday without ever getting the chance to leave. In practice, I've never spent more than about 36 hours uninterrupted, and I certainly got a chance to sleep during that time, but I had to stay in-house. By contrast, even a busy pager was good for a month or so on a single AA battery, and when it was dying, you had about 3-4 days to carry out the 30-second swap process for a new one.
I don't carry a pager these days, in a smaller community hospital (~500 beds), where we are all known to the people that need to call us. But when I was at a larger academic hospital, the staff changed all the time. Residents came and went, faculty came and went. If you wanted the anesthesiologist in charge of running things, you just dialed one pager number. It was always the same, regardless of who was on call. No need to look up a call schedule. You either got a faculty member or a final-year resident, and the senior residents always knew who their faculty were in case it got really hairy.
Like the AC below said, handing off the pager really was a momentous thing in its own way, in much the same way that there is an enormously formal ceremony for handing over control of a ship or an airplane. Once you put that in someone else's hands, you are relieved. Until then, you are not. There is no ambiguity about who is responsible: if you're the guy with the pager, you're it.