Bathroom ettiquite

[DoctwoB]

It happens without fail. The scrubs go down, and as soon as the cheeks hit the seat . . . The phone rings. What do you do now? Sure 99/100 times it's because so and so's blood pressure is 165, but you never know when it might be someone sick.

Back in the pager days you could just finish and call back. Now that every service has a phone at my program, it's much more intrusive. Please help with this moral conundrum!

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[ACSurgeon]

It happens without fail. The scrubs go down, and as soon as the cheeks hit the seat . . . The phone rings. What do you do now? Sure 99/100 times it's because so and so's blood pressure is 165, but you never know when it might be someone sick.

Back in the pager days you could just finish and call back. Now that every service has a phone at my program, it's much more intrusive. Please help with this moral conundrum!

- do number 2 at home
- give the phone to someone else one you need to
- call back afterwards?

 

[TraumaLlamaMD]

Is there an easily accesible call back number (or preferably call back function) on your phones? At my institution, if you miss a call on the little phones some services have there's no way to see who called you and you have to wait for them to call back again.

 

[mimelim]

It happens without fail. The scrubs go down, and as soon as the cheeks hit the seat . . . The phone rings. What do you do now? Sure 99/100 times it's because so and so's blood pressure is 165, but you never know when it might be someone sick.

Back in the pager days you could just finish and call back. Now that every service has a phone at my program, it's much more intrusive. Please help with this moral conundrum!

Why can't you answer the phone while in the bathroom? It isn't like they know where you are. Whoever is calling is calling because they need help or something. If it is something that can wait 10 minutes, just say, "I'll take care of it in a few minutes." and then just write it down and keep going about your business. If a patient is coding and you are the code team, you don't have much of a choice but to suck it up. Just keep a pen/paper with you when you go to the bathroom. If you are in there for more than 10 minutes, then you should work on that . More fiber, more water, metamucil, whatever, don't get roids...

There are very few things that literally can't wait a minute.

I guess if a patient is coding that's a problem - but if so they will have called the code team as well.

But anyways I'm glad i have a pager for exactly this reason.

+1

 

[turkeyjerky]

I'm an EM resident. Getting some services to call back can be worse than pulling teeth, but taking a bathroom break works w/o fail. Thus, I ALWAYS pick up the phone in this situation.

 

[dpmd]

When I carried one of those phones I would check the caller ID and only answer if it was 1.) someone I figured wouldn't care I was in the bathroom (it is something you can tell typically even if you aren't making any noise-the quality of the sound is different) 2.) some out of the hospital number (not many people had access to those numbers so it wasn't going to be a patient or something, and I don't recall a call the number back option aside from *69 I guess but doesn't that cost money?). Otherwise they could just call me back or I could call them back. Only chiefs and the interns on call had those though so everyone else could just call back a page like a normal human.

Nowadays in private practice where everything comes through my cell phone and I can easily call numbers back (or they can actually leave a voicemail which wasn't an option on the in house phones) I pretty much only answer in the bathroom if my exchange calls me when I get up to pee at night because I can kind of hang my head out of the toilet/shower area and hopefully they can't hear anything.

 

[dpmd]

Actually that isn't entirely true. I have answered while in a bathtub too.