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Old 23rd Feb 2019, 6:30 pm   #21
stitch1
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Default Re: NHS Now to ditch Pagers.

Hospital trusts already have mobile phone contracts which are awarded via tender the same as others in public sector. No need for additional devices or contracts.

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Old 23rd Feb 2019, 8:09 pm   #22
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Default Re: NHS Now to ditch Pagers.

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Originally Posted by paulsherwin View Post
Mobile phones have been allowed in most hospital environments for about a decade. They were initially prohibited because bureaucrats were terrified they'd be sued if they caused interference with medical equipment (they don't).
I was assured by my sister, who until recently worked in an intensive care baby unit, that early analogue mobile phones definitely interfered with incubators and peristaltic drug pumps causing the control panels to display jibberish and changing the settings.
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Old 23rd Feb 2019, 8:14 pm   #23
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Default Re: NHS Now to ditch Pagers.

I've found one of my old pagers, it was the last one to be issued and the frequency marked on it is 459.375 MHz. There was no battery/cell in it, but it would have been an 'AA' type. There's definitely a much older one around somewhere, but exactly where is a good question, unless it got left at work and thrown out when I cleared all my 'stuff'!
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Old 23rd Feb 2019, 8:23 pm   #24
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Default Re: NHS Now to ditch Pagers.

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Early analogue mobile phones definitely interfered with incubators and peristaltic drug pumps causing the control panels to display jibberish and changing the settings.
They still don't normally allow them in ICUs, which is hardly an issue for the patients, but may be for the doctors that have to use them. Presumably somebody has looked at this issue.
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Old 23rd Feb 2019, 8:47 pm   #25
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Default Re: NHS Now to ditch Pagers.

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I was assured by my sister, who until recently worked in an intensive care baby unit, that early analogue mobile phones definitely interfered with incubators and peristaltic drug pumps causing the control panels to display jibberish and changing the settings.
I have no doubt that's true. Given the way EEG and ECG machines are interfaced with the human body, it's difficult to see how, even today, the leads can be totally screened from external interference. Perhaps one way is to provide them with a wide-band retriever to pick up environmental noise, and do a differential analysts.
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Old 23rd Feb 2019, 9:01 pm   #26
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Default Re: NHS Now to ditch Pagers.

They’re all differential measurements AFAIK so common mode noise is killed off by the CMRR of the front end instrumentation amps. I know they had problems with 50Hz hum on EEG though and just used a sharp LPF to pass up to gamma. I had to design a filter for this at university!

Also stuff that’s on the general market has RFI immunity standards. Same for medical devices! This was not always the case however and I think a lot of that tribal fear has been passed down a couple of decades past where it should.

I think most of the signs up in hospitals now are to stop people crashing into each other while staring at their phones
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Old 23rd Feb 2019, 9:27 pm   #27
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Default Re: NHS Now to ditch Pagers.

We have slightly mixed messages in our GP surgery.

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Old 23rd Feb 2019, 9:38 pm   #28
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Default Re: NHS Now to ditch Pagers.

I wonder if any hospitals still use the original Multitone "Bleeps"
Going past one of the Bradford hospitals on the bus you can't fail to see the old 27Mhz dipole on the roof, although the feeder looks a bit sorry for itself. Some were inductive loops, but hospitals were too big for that system.
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Old 23rd Feb 2019, 9:39 pm   #29
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Default Re: NHS Now to ditch Pagers.

Back to pagers.
In about 2000 we had two-way pagers with a QWERTY keyboard, it was the length of a house-brick and almost as heavy!
We were banned from using them in the office because of the herringbone interference they caused on the secretary's computer monitor.
I recon they must have run at least 5 watts.

Before that we had "National Band 3" radios in our cars.
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Old 23rd Feb 2019, 9:54 pm   #30
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Default Re: NHS Now to ditch Pagers.

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I wonder if any hospitals still use the original Multitone "Bleeps"
Good grief, what a thought! Mind you, the picture of one of the pagers here
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47332415
is called a "Multitone", I suppose it's similar cheap technology that some pubs and restaurants use to tell you when your table is ready.

Quote:
Going past one of the Bradford hospitals on the bus you can't fail to see the old 27Mhz dipole on the roof, although the feeder looks a bit sorry for itself. Some were inductive loops, but hospitals were too big for that system.
The bleeps, presumably from the nearby Crumpsall, now North Manchester General Hospital, were the only thing I could receive on the highest frequency plug-in coil on my one valve (1T4) super-regenerative receiver.

As I remember it, the multi tones were followed by a regular beeping at a consent pitch, leading me to conclude that the receiver did not even have to generate the alert tones itself.
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Old 23rd Feb 2019, 10:47 pm   #31
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Default Re: NHS Now to ditch Pagers.

I've got and old blue 27Mhz multitone page around somewhere. And packed in its carriage tube a Multitone 27 Mhz dipole aerial. It was kept as a spare for the hospital system, they then upgraded and I 'won' the aerial. I must do something with it.
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Old 23rd Feb 2019, 11:42 pm   #32
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Default Re: NHS Now to ditch Pagers.

In th early 1970's, one of my colleagues at Plessey left to join Multitone, and on one occasion when we met up in a pub, he showed us the prototype of their new model that the user could programme with up to 10 messages. You had to dial a different number for each message. He gave me a sixpence and asked me to phone a particular number (the pub had an internal payphone), whereupon one of the messages was displayed. We were all amazed!

I didn't have any personal experience of the "National" mobile phone networks, but found this map of the GEC National One network in the back of an old "Marconi Marine" ring binder when I was with GEC.
Attached Files
File Type: pdf GEC National one_j.pdf (1.89 MB, 221 views)
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Old 24th Feb 2019, 12:35 am   #33
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Default Re: NHS Now to ditch Pagers.

Quote:
Originally Posted by rambo1152 View Post
Quote:
130,000 pagers ... cost the NHS about £6.6m a year, because only one service provider supports them.

NHS trusts will be allowed to keep some pagers for emergency situations, for example if the wi-fi or mobile networks went offline.
If it costs £6.6m a year to maintain a pager network for 130,000 pagers, how much will it cost to maintain a pager network for say 1,000 emergency pagers?

I'm going to guess that the cost of the network is more or less fixed regardless of the number of pagers in use.
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Old 24th Feb 2019, 9:36 am   #34
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Default Re: NHS Now to ditch Pagers.

I still receive a 49 MHz pager here, and a very strong signal it is. I've never got around to decoding it so I don't know if it's POCSAG or not. It's probably coming from the hospital, which is line-of-sight from here.
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Old 24th Feb 2019, 11:07 am   #35
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Default Re: NHS Now to ditch Pagers.

Just to put some perspective on this. Many years ago a company I worked for had a problem. Nearly every weekend some people would break down the back doors of the building to get at the TV's and VCR's stored there. Nothing worked, by the time the security company got there they had absconded with the goods.

Finally somebody installed a big red sign with white writing on the doors that said "Danger: 22,000 Volt installation Turn off breakers AB:1 and AB:5 before entering" or something similar. Then they were never robbed again. The bluff worked.

Many businesses, Hospitals, Doctor's surgeries, Aircraft etc, notice that it is very hard to communicate with people if the proceedings are constantly interrupted with people on mobiles phones. It is a big distraction and a time waster. So signs started to appear:

"Warning: mobile phones interfere with delicate medical equipment" "Phones interfere with aircraft navigation", etc etc.

Every engineer who designs medical equipment (as I have myself) and avionics equipment ensures that the equipment is totally immune to RFI, including a vicious diathermy machines nearby and massive RF fields. If a mobile phone (or 20 phones at the same time) could interfere with a machine's function, the design is defective.

What you are seeing with warnings about mobile phones and their output, interfering with equipment, for the most part, represents a form of "Crowd Control" nothing more.

The warnings of interference is just a tool to manipulate the users, to stop using them, which is more convenient for the nurse, doctor, or cabin crew to provide uninterrupted services.

Though, in bad cases of poor electronic design, a mobile phone signal (or perhaps radio telephone signal) detonated a poorly designed missile on the deck of a warship. Clearly though, this was extremely poor design.

Pagers are an obsolete device now, after all they have no ability to navigate the internet, unlike a mobile phone!

However when I had mine at the hospital back in the 1990's is was quite useful. When my girlfriend who also worked at the hospital was thinking of me, she would phone my pager from the hospital phones and leave a call back number 222222. So often I would be in the middle of something, like an operation and my pager would be on the desk. It would beep and a staff member would pick it up and say, "that is weird, there is no call back number here, its just a row of 2's, what does that mean ?" I'd say, "I have no idea".
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Old 24th Feb 2019, 12:25 pm   #36
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Default Re: NHS Now to ditch Pagers.

Back in the Summer of 1998, "Lauren" and I had number pagers. You dialled the phone number on the pager, entered a series of DTMF digits, and the other person's pager bept and displayed the number you had entered. That could be a number on which to call them back, but we also had various codes arranged for phrases like 3939 = "I'm coming home, and I'm hungry"; 444 = "Emergency! Something really terrible has happened" and others probably better left to the reader's own imagination

Just a year later, digital mobile phones had become affordable to the masses; and a feature that was originally intended as a gimmick, a way of packing some information into an otherwise wasted area of the "overhead" in each message between the handset and the cell tower, found itself an ecological niche: the Short Message Service. Text messages were initially cheaper than calls, as they used much less traffic: Hey, anybody listening? Cell tower #269 reporting for duty! I've got a message, here it is: ..... Did you just say ..... Yeah, that's right. I'm done here! compared to keeping a voice channel open for the duration of a call. Cross-network messaging ended up bringing in more revenue than selling phones with the exclusive ability to send text messages to your own subscribers. At one point, you could even get a phone specially designed mainly for text messaging, styled like a miniature laptop with a QWERTY keypad and requiring a plug-in headset to make or answer voice calls.

No ordinary person had any reason ever to buy a plain old pager again, once the SMS revolution had taken hold: a mobile phone could do everything a pager did and more. And it worked both ways.

But it was all great while it lasted
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Old 24th Feb 2019, 12:39 pm   #37
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Default Re: NHS Now to ditch Pagers.

Quote:
But it was all great while it lasted
Yes, it was.

The other thing pagers were good for (because not everybody had them unlike mobile phones) you could have a friend page you in the middle of a really boring and time wasting meeting. It was much more melodramatic than a mobile phone.

You could stare at the pager with an alarmed look and have a legitimate reason to rush out of the room to attend to an emergency. Now if someone's mobile goes off in a meeting they get a scathing look from everybody that they should have muted the ringer.
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Old 24th Feb 2019, 12:52 pm   #38
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Default Re: NHS Now to ditch Pagers.

An NHS Health Technology assessment many years back looked at mobile phone interference and recommend that mobile phones are safe to use in hospitals.

Rather amused by Argus25's girlfriend's message. The UK standard cardiac arrest telephone number (for internal hospital use) is 2222 ...

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Old 24th Feb 2019, 3:11 pm   #39
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Default Re: NHS Now to ditch Pagers.

They can be totally hands free, unlike the get out of jail version of hands free usual with a mobile phone. Obsolete is fighting talk on a Forum like this!
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Old 24th Feb 2019, 3:13 pm   #40
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Default Re: NHS Now to ditch Pagers.

Visiting someone in an ITU recently and indeed several times over the recent years, there were no signs against mobiles and several (conscious ! ) patients were using them whilst connected to many Star Trek items of equipment. Similarly, in the normal wards, mobile use was endemic. I think it is just a matter of courtesy and common sense these days with few exceptions.
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