GET TO KNOW THE AUTHOR: I’m Ximena Chavarria, IMG from Guatemala, currently PGY-1 doing IM residency in California.Outside of medicine, I love watching baseball (Yankee fan), cooking and hanging out with my dog, Mack.
1. Paging system: Yes! We still use pagers even though this is 2025! Pagers are meant to contact a specific MD in an urgent situation. The situation is not an emergency (otherwise, they will probably get a rapid response team, stroke team, code blue team, etc, on the hospital alert system). Still, it is urgent to get guidance from an MD on how to proceed with a given situation. Examples: Patient is getting agitated, and the nurse wants you to assess the patient and possibly give medications for agitation. Why do we need an MD in this situation? Maybe the patient is retaining urine, and you need to order a bladder scan + Foley insertion to resolve the agitation. Maybe the patient just needs reassurance from a doctor and a little conversation to let them know everything is ok, or maybe this patient has a history of getting violent, so you actually need to get agitation medication to prevent staff from getting hurt. You’ll need to figure out what to do when the page comes! haha How does it work? Depending on your hospital, you’ll probably need to carry it with you at all times, especially when you’re on call. Your pager has a specific number, like your cell phone number, that you´ll need to memorize and also put somewhere in the EMR of your patients so the staff know who to page Before night shifts, make sure your pager has enough battery, as they may not be available at night. You don’t want your pager dying in the middle of the night. #crisis Usually, the pager screen will only display a number that you’ll have to call back to contact the person who paged you. It might have a small message letting you know what it is about. Example: “Room 1234 low BP, ext 00000” Depending on your hospital, you might also need to page other specialties for a consult. The message is usually brief, and you need to include a phone number so they can reach you back. Example: You want surgery to evaluate your patient for toe ischemia. Your page might look like this: “Room 1234. Vascular surgery consult for R toe gangrene. Call back 805-000-0000”. Let them know where or who your patient is, who you’re consulting, why you're consulting them, and how to contact you for the verbal consult. Ask if your hospital needs to transfer pagers every time you’re on call or if the system transfers them automatically. Transferring a pager is really easy, you'll probably need to call the operator and ask them to transfer the pager.
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