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Old 24th Feb 2019, 5:02 pm   #41
ionburn
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Default Re: NHS Now to ditch Pagers.

When at work the last hospital pager I used was many years ago. Out in the community we had been supplied with mobile phones for some considerable time. Locally they used to be Vodaphone, but when I left they were EE. As one might imagine, in rural Lincolnshire they were a bit iffy at times. In the early days there was a system in place to re-imburse company use of private phones, but that quickly became impractical with the modern age. For IT use WiFi hotspots became the way to go, and staff used them with VPN connection.The IT department was responsible for service.
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Old 24th Feb 2019, 5:21 pm   #42
dglcomp
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Default Re: NHS Now to ditch Pagers.

Quote:
Originally Posted by julie_m View Post
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.
Yes, I nearly got that model (as a Christmas present) but it was out of stock, it was made by Motorola and was translucent blue if I remember (and about £40 on PAYG), ended up getting a Trium Mars instead.
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Old 24th Feb 2019, 6:16 pm   #43
Graham G3ZVT
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Default Re: NHS Now to ditch Pagers.

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Originally Posted by dr_nick View Post
Rather amused by Argus25's girlfriend's message. The UK standard cardiac arrest telephone number (for internal hospital use) is 2222 ...
Beat me to it Nick, and "Not for Twos" is (or was) a euphemism for "Do Not Resuscitate.
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Old 24th Feb 2019, 7:31 pm   #44
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Default Re: NHS Now to ditch Pagers.

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Originally Posted by Argus25 View Post
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.
Mine went off in the cinema once

They also worked for 6 weeks on one AA battery and swapping the battery took 30 seconds - no waiting to put the sodding thing on charge overnight.
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Old 28th Feb 2019, 7:51 pm   #45
G6Tanuki
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Default Re: NHS Now to ditch Pagers.

As well as traditional pagers, there were special "Firecall" pagers that operated around 147MHz. Made by Pye and issued to firemen who had normal-jobs but who were expected to drop everything and drive/cycle/run pell-mell to the firestation when their alerter went off.

The transmitters ran quite a high ERP - many of the areas covered were rural so you needed plenty of RF. I had one such transmitter about half a mile from me and when it 'lit up' it seriously desensed my bioilar-transistor-based 2-metre converter! Annoying, but also amusing because I could seemingly randomly announce to people "There's a fire somewhere", a few minutes later we'd hear the sirens, and people would look at me as if I was telepathic or something.
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Old 28th Feb 2019, 9:43 pm   #46
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Default Re: NHS Now to ditch Pagers.

I was under the impression that the hospital cordless handsets that staff appear to be issued with nowadays were some form of DECT system. I wonder if some kind of local SMS or messaging system is implemented through this from say the main admin switchboard, who would handle calls locally for urgent staff deployment. I will ask about this when I next visit in a couple of weeks time. My neice works on a hospital switchboard so I could ask her I suppose. I am curious now. Regarding the old callout/standby pagers we used Motorola ones with a simple LCD screen for messages. I can still clearly recall the noise it made. That was the worse sound in the world. They worked on the old VHF paging network and there was a transmitter not far from home so it was fine. They went over to a UHF system and I missed calls all the time on that one. The original pagers just bleeped and worked on our own low band VHF network using four tones to set them off. Except if the fault was on the VHF system, they couldn't call you out to fix it because it was off. The retained fire station pagers or "alerters" as they were known were made by Multitone and worked from a line triggered local VHF high band base station usually installed on the fire tower at the station running about 25 Watts. I looked after those in the mid eighties. I'm not sure what they use nowadays.
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Old 1st Mar 2019, 6:36 pm   #47
OscarFoxtrot
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Default Re: NHS Now to ditch Pagers.

There's a slightly different perspective on Wired

Quote:
In a statement laying out Hancock's "purge the pager" plan, the government says: "The NHS uses around 130,000 pagers at an annual cost of £6.6 million. More than one in 10 of the world’s pagers are used by the NHS."

Those figures do not come from the government's own research, but from a report by CommonTime, a company that offers smartphone-based pager replacing systems. ...

And then there's the claim the NHS uses more than 10 per cent of the world's pagers. That's based on a claim from CommonTime that only a million of the devices are used globally. Capita pointed to figures from the Critical Messaging Association suggesting there are tens of millions in use globally...

Who else uses them? Other hospitals; surveys in the US suggest 90 per cent of American hospitals are also heavily reliant on pagers. They're also used by the Ministry of Defence, emergency services, utilities companies, and, perhaps most charmingly, by birdwatchers – there's two competing systems for bird alerts, BirdNet and SwiftAlert. The RNLI even built its own system for emergency callouts.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/nhs-pagers
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