{"id":7843,"date":"2019-02-23T05:11:32","date_gmt":"2019-02-23T05:11:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.styledeals.co.uk\/blog\/nhs-told-to-ditch-outdated-pagers\/"},"modified":"2019-02-23T05:11:32","modified_gmt":"2019-02-23T05:11:32","slug":"nhs-told-to-ditch-outdated-pagers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.styledeals.co.uk\/blog\/nhs-told-to-ditch-outdated-pagers\/","title":{"rendered":"NHS told to ditch ‘outdated’ pagers"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n
<\/p>\n

\"A<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n

The NHS has been told to stop using pagers for communications by 2021, in order to save money.<\/p>\n

The health service still uses about 130,000 pagers, which is about 10% of the total left in use globally.<\/p>\n

They cost the NHS about \u00a36.6m a year, because only one service provider supports them.<\/p>\n

Health Secretary Matt Hancock called them “outdated” and said he wanted to rid the NHS of “archaic technology like pagers and fax machines”. <\/p>\n

How do pagers work?<\/h2>\n

The pagers used in the NHS today are mostly one-way communication devices that can receive short messages but cannot send replies.<\/p>\n

To send a message, staff call either an automated phone line or speak to a dedicated operator.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/span>

Image caption<\/span>
\n
\n The NHS uses about 130,000 pagers
\n <\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The recipient’s pager will beep and display the message or a phone number to call. In order to call back, the recipient must use a mobile phone or find a landline.<\/p>\n

Pagers were widely used in the 1980s, before mobile phones and two-way SMS text messages became more popular.<\/p>\n

Vodafone ended its national pager service in March 2018. Capita’s PageOne is the last remaining pager network left in the UK.<\/p>\n

Why does the NHS still use pagers?<\/h2>\n

One doctor told the BBC that the pager system is useful in emergencies, for example if a patient goes into cardiac arrest in a hospital.<\/p>\n

Sending an alert to several members of the cardiac arrest team can take less than a minute, which is critical in an emergency situation.<\/p>\n

\n
\n <\/p>\n

Media playback is unsupported on your device<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>

Media caption<\/span>Retro tech: When the pager was king<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The pager network uses its own transmitters, so messages are typically delivered reliably and quickly.<\/p>\n

NHS trusts will be allowed to keep some pagers for emergency situations, for example if the wi-fi or mobile networks went offline.<\/p>\n

But Mr Hancock said “email and mobile phones” were a “more secure, quicker and cheaper way to communicate”.<\/p>\n

“We have to get the basics right, like having computers that work and getting rid of archaic technology like pagers and fax machines,” he said.<\/p>\n

In 2017, the West Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust ran a trial and replaced its pagers with an app called Medic Bleep.<\/p>\n

The app let staff message and call one another, individually or in groups, and worked on phones, tablets and desktop computers. <\/p>\n

The Department of Health and Social Care described it as “similar to WhatsApp” but with enhanced security, and said it had saved doctors time.<\/p>\n

The Trust is now “weeks away” from removing non-emergency pagers at its main hospital. <\/p>\n

An investigation in 2018 found that the NHS was still sending documents from around 9,000 fax machines, which Mr Hancock also hopes to phase out. <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n


\n
Source<\/a> by [author_name]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The NHS has been told to stop using pagers for communications by 2021, in order to save money. The health service still uses about 130,000 pagers, which is about 10% of the total left in use globally. They cost the NHS about \u00a36.6m a year, because only one service provider supports them. Health Secretary Matt … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":7844,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.styledeals.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.styledeals.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.styledeals.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.styledeals.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7843"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.styledeals.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7843\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.styledeals.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.styledeals.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.styledeals.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.styledeals.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}