[mikecsh]

In my experience (UK) there is no personal information transmitted. There are two main types of bleeps:

1. Sending the number of a telephone extension you want the recipient of the bleep to call. For example, if I need a cardiology opinion, I will bleep the cardiologist with a telephone extension and wait for them to (hopefully) call back while I am still but he phone and before it is called by anyone else. This data is not sensitive. These are the types of bleeps which are being replaced slowly by asynchronous communication via apps

2. Emergency bleeps which are designed to alert a specific group of people on the arrest team to respond to an emergency. These usually work quite differently. Instead of 1:1 they are 1:many and usually carry a different alert tone, followed by a (generally poor quality) audio alert of the operator saying something like "paediatric cardiac arrest inbound to ED, ETA, 5 minutes". Again these carry no sensitive data.

[Fogest]

Yeah from what I have heard from Canadian based doctors the pagers are used for almost identically the same as what you described for the UK.

[klyrs]

Pagers get used for PII, and if somebody thinks it doesn't happen, they're simply confident that their experience is representative. It happens, and quite frequently, in Canada.

https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/id/security/news/vulnerabil...

[Fogest]

Yeah what you linked me to talks about I believe the same case another user already linked to. It was more correct for me to say I was speaking more about the Ontario, Canada healthcare system as that is the one I work within. The healthcare systems are mostly run at the provincial level so it can be hard to talk about the countries healthcare as a whole as it can often vary province to province.