Bleeping alternative
DHB ditches pagers for cellphones
Spark is set to hang up the public pager network on June 30, prompting those reliant on the service to find a bleeping alternative.
The fire service will take over the network from July 1 and has made contracts available to emergency services, health boards and pager-reliant businesses.
Wellington’s Capital & Coast DHB has chosen to ditch the 1980s technology and rolled out about 350 smartphones and 150 basic cellphones for staff in its Kenepuru and Wellington hospitals.
Ahead of the network changes, an audit by the DHB revealed 20 per cent of the bleepers were either gathering dust in drawers or never used, according to Dr Peter Hicks, ICU specialist and senior clinical adviser for IT.
Also, the old technology could send only basic information and often required phone calls. There were also problems when trying to chase down paged staff on landlines - a plight known as ‘‘pager rage’’, Hicks said.
With about 660 pagers in the network and contracts at $25 per pager per month, the board decided the near-$200,000 it was spending on the network each year wasn’t money well spent.
But in an industry where communication was life or death, the board had to ensure cellphones would be reliable in an emergency - especially if the phone was deep in a pocket or laying on a desk.
‘‘We have about 15 types of emergencies, from a lift stuck to a fire event,’’ Hicks said. ‘‘The major ones are medical emergencies and we call it a 777 because that’s what you dial on the phone.’’
In the past, operators had a preset number of pagers they would alert, ‘‘and that’s the bit everyone was worried how to replicate’’.
Group texts had been trialled elsewhere, but sometimes they wouldn’t come through on time, or they weren’t being read. To combat this, an app has been loaded on to the phones that generates a foghorn sound.
‘‘So the phone operators get the 777 call, they go to a computer screen and type in where it is, press a couple of buttons, the message goes out, and the phones go off like a foghorn. Everyone knows exactly what that sound is.’’
They can chose from a handful of pre-set replies to say whether they will attend and if they will be delayed.
Phones are allocated to roles, not people, which ensures an onduty doctor is always at the end of particular phones.
The board will have its own app store - with recommended useful apps that will be free for staff, Dr Kyle Perrin, performance and innovation clinical director and general physician at Wellington Hospital said.
After hours medical staff have been using an app called Smartpage since late last year, which lets them send patient observations and warning signs on a secured network, ‘‘but it’s not enough to cover everything’’, Perrin said.
If the network is overloaded – say in an emergency or on New Year’s Eve, the hospital’s comms will be prioritised by the telco, Hicks said.
‘‘Because they’re role-based phones, we can give those phone numbers to the provider and [that means] our calls would all get through.’’