It breaks my heart to say this, but my pager and I are not doing so well. Perhaps I should modify that - my pager and I are a team, but everyone seems to hate us.
Two nights running, now, I haven't been receiving pages. The first night, it was one of the regular floors that kept paging, and then went to the operator when they couldn't reach me. But the odd thing is, the operator's page went through right away. Near the very end of my shift, I got paged by my senior to ask why I wasn't responding to pages from the ICU. Irritatingly, I was sitting at a computer 15 feet from the ICU, checking labs, and hadn't received the page. Last night, I missed a code, although at least that one had an explanation - the operator (who was new) thought that only the intern covering that patient needed to get paged, when in fact ALL interns have to go to the bedside.
Now, most pages you get in the middle of the night are not emergent. Most often, it's just for something small, like renewal of a medication or an order that wasn't written correctly. Occasionally, there's a problem where you do need to go down and check the patient out in person, like blood pressure issues or chest pain concerns. Naturally, in such a scenario, the nurse wants to reach you. But twice now, instead of trying me via the operator, they went straight to contacting my senior resident, which makes me look like The Lazy Intern Who Ignores Pages and Can't Be Trusted. What kills me is that I really do want to go to all of these pages, because I'm still learning as I go and I certainly don't want to miss something important like a heart attack or stroke.
I don't like to complain about technological pitfalls in hospitals, because the fact remains that only 10% of all hospitals in the United States even have EMR systems, and I picked residencies based in poorer inner-city areas because I wanted the experience. But it seems to me that the whole pager system is shockingly inefficient and cost-ineffective. I once did an ob-gyn rotation at a hospital in New Jersey where, instead of pagers, they had in-house cell-phones. They were pretty big and bulky, more like cordless phones, but they worked great because anyone trying to reach you didn't have to wait for you to call-back. There was no question of receiving a page with a hospital extension that didn't exist (I once got paged to the 5th floor, and we don't have one), or trying to call someone back only to find that they had walked away from the phone. If you were busy and running around the hospital, a person trying to reach you didn't have to wait for you to get to a nursing station with a phone not in use. Also, for anyone in a surgical or ob-gyn residency, if you were scrubbed into a case, the circulating nurse could pick up for you and relay the message right away, or even hold the phone to your ear if necessary. It made getting the work done easier for everyone, nurses and residents alike.
Maddeningly, I have tested and re-tested my pager a million times, and it is working just great. Of course, I could just trade the sucker in for a new one, but then I would lose my Hawaii Five-O theme song ringtone. Fortunately, the important nurses (covering the critically ill patients in the ICU) know that I'm serious about wanting to come and help, and aren't angry at me. Last night, I averted the situation by physically going to each floor and making them page me to prove that it was working, and that I did want to come down for anything important. I also made sure they all had the phone number for the girls' call room phone, just in case something didn't go through. But the nurses on the floor are a little bit less invested in making a real effort all of the time, and the last thing I need is talk spreading all over the hospital that I'm the surgical intern who doesn't give a crap.
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