| Ah yes - sorry, I read that too quickly. The answer to that (at least limited to my experience of pagers in many UK hospitals) is that they don't carry any sensitive data at all. There are a lot of other issues with them though. There are few companies supplying them so they are actually very expensive. Consequently in our publicly funded health service they are not replaced often and many are in a poor state with batteries held in by tape etc. The main issues from perspective as a user is the synchronous model of communication that they enforce. Unless something is an emergency, it's an unnecessarily disruptive workflow. There are usually a limited number of phones on a ward, which are usually very busy lines. Using pagers for routine communication means: 1. Physically move myself to a location with a phone
2. Wait for phone to be free
3. Call a number to send the bleep
4. Wait for a response (bearing in mind the recipient needs to be free, move to a phone, wait for that phone to be free, and call back)
5. Guard the phone from others using it until I receive the call
6. Hope that no one else calls the phone in the meantime Bearing in mind that everyone is always busy in hospital this is a huge source of frustration and wasted time, hence the move towards secure messaging apps for these scenarios. Unfortunately these are mostly being built as silos rather than interoperable communication networks. As mentioned above, for actually alerting a group of people to an emergency when you need an immediate response, pagers are still hard to beat. |