The NHS is spending millions of pounds on out-dated, limited and inefficient pagers every year, according to a new report by digital solutions company, CommonTime.
Pager
The report, Pagers in the NHS: The Cost of Ageing Comms Channels in Healthcare, looks at how prominent the usage of pagers is by the NHS. The report reveals that the NHS is one of the biggest users of the devices, with 138 Trusts estimated to be using over 10% of all pagers in circulation worldwide.
Despite a global decline of the technology, the NHS is still spending over £6 million every year on pagers, the report states. The report highlights the limitations of the devices, such as being unable to support vital two-way communication between NHS professionals and a lack of auditing capabilities. More so, with key suppliers such as Vodafone having now left the pager market, it’s expected that NHS staff may turn to other methods for communication such as WhatsApp and Snapchat.
By moving from pagers to smartphones and other mobile devices, the document states that the NHS could save over £2.7 million from the direct costs associated with the technology, as well as network maintenance costs.
However, some digitally progressive trusts were already found to be moving away from pagers, even though 97.8% of hospitals still relied on the devices.
Commenting in the report, Rowan Pritchard Jones, a consultant plastic reconstructive surgeon and chief clinical information officer at St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, said: “Pagers represent 20th Century technology and are a blunt instrument for communication. Apart from a ‘fast bleep’ doctors have no sense of the urgency or priority of a call, end up writing down messages that can be lost, and often find a telephone number engaged when they do answer it.
“There has to be a more refined, accountable, reliable way to communicate. Doubtless a task the smartphone could cope with provided we are assured of the wifi or signal coverage in modern day hospitals.”
Dr Johan Waktare, a consultant cardiologist, who serves as director and health informatics consultant at ITEH, also commented in the report: “Pagers are a technology that have very much stood still. There is always a strong case for having a resilient way of being able to contact people, classically for crash alerts. But, for many of the other tasks that pager technology is used for, they’re not very efficient and clinical time is wasted. Pagers are so much part of the wallpaper in the NHS, nobody is really thinking about how we could best meet our workflow needs in 2017.”
Geoff Hall, CCIO & Associate Medical Director - Infomatics Leeds Cancer Centre and Dave Moody, Data & Telecoms Infrastructure manager Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, defended the use of pagers, saying: “Pagers seem like old technology, but they still exist purely for their inherent high levels of resilience. They are simple to use i.e. calls can be pushed out by ringing one number, there is an audit trail, the device is easy to carry, and the battery lasts months, not hours. They do only one task, but they do it well. They provide a last line of defence. Internally we operate on our own radio infrastructure. The paging networks have few points of failure unlike Wi-Fi infrastructures, operate on dedicated frequencies, and can easily be ring fenced to ensure continued service during power outages. In terms of radio technology, they operate at a much lower frequency to those used by mobile phones. The low frequency has the benefit of travelling further, therefore better coverage and has much better building penetration. The frequency is also considerably less congested, so in times of peak demand, e.g. New Year’s Eve, or during a major incident, the message will still get through.”