Having no cell service in the hospital during clerkships

[somethingdeep]

I'm med student currently in pre-clinical years. I'm looking ahead to next year when I'll be starting clerkships. I've noticed that I have absolutely no (T-Mobile) cell service in many parts of the hospital, and extremely poor service in the rest. Is this going to be a problem in clerkships? I'm assuming med students need cell phones to stay in contact with their resident and the rest of the team. I know people with AT&T have good service, but I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one with T-Mobile, so I was wondering what students do in this situation.

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[Awared]

If you have an iphone you can use wifi for imessage

 

[colbgw02]

Your school doesn't issue you a pager?

 

[FutureInternist]

Med students do get pagers at most places

If yours does not, then best bet is to ask residents what they use & switch since you will be at a significant disadvantage (not to mention, piss off the team) if you are unreachable

 

[drcrispmd]

typically texting is the best way to be reached and to reach your resident. As a student, we used it to keep in contact with other students on the rotation.

 

[235009]

You should probably switch

 

[loltopsy]

ATT sucks balls, but their reception is better in the hospitals I've been in compared to my friends' providers.

 

[kami333]

I ended up switching from T-Mobile to Verizon due to the reception issues (I'm a bit more rural than you as well which didn't help).


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[Kaustikos]

I've honestly rarely used my phone in the hospital. Considering I spent a lot of time in the OR, I just habitually turned it to airplane mode. Not like anyone needs to contact a med student. You have a pager and some pagers actually let you receive texts from people. Don't worry about it.
I honestly get more annoying things with my phone on than helpful things. People trying to contact me like I'm not busy...

 

[tdram]

Yeah, no one really needs to contact a med student. We don't get pagers. I only texted residents a handful of times all year. Mostly it was in GYN where they let us go do whatever we wanted and texted us for consults. Except they didn't bother for most of the consults so we just didn't do much all day.

 

[Siggy]

There are places where students get pagers as a matter of course? At my hospital, only students on specific services (cardiology, which is all consults) or on call (surgery call students) get pagers. The rest get nothing.

 

[colbgw02]

We were issued pagers at the start of MS3 that we kept until graduation. We were paged every now and then, but they were great for keeping up with other students both during and away from rotations. They could receive texts that could be sent from the school's website, so it was a great way to coordinate social events. Keep in mind, this was before text messaging/smart phones and when unlimited calling plans were a luxury, so anything that could save cell phone minutes was a plus.

If your school expects medical students to be available, then it's their responsibility to give you the means. If they don't, then tell them some random guy on the internet says that they're wrong. It's not reasonable for a medical school to expect a student to even have a cellphone, much less one with a specific carrier.

 

[evilbooyaa]

I very, very rarely get paged. I communicated with almost all of my residents throughout all of MS3 (and definitely in MS4 so far) through cellphone, NOT pager (except if I knew that person was in the OR and was needed for something emergent). Having cell service in the hospital that can at least do basic texts is critical.

 

[235009]

If your school expects medical students to be available, then it's their responsibility to give you the means. If they don't, then tell them some random guy on the internet says that they're wrong. It's not reasonable for a medical school to expect a student to even have a cellphone, much less one with a specific carrier.

I disagree. My med school eliminated MS3 pagers my year because they realized everyone has a cell phone and the average MS3 got paged maybe a couple times per rotation so the expectation is that you use your personal cell phone for communication and if you don't have one etc you can let them know and (i'm assuming) they'd issue you a pager ...though of course this issue never came up

 

[somethingdeep]

Thanks for the replies! Still not sure what to do about this issue. I haven't heard whether my school issues pagers--I'll have to ask some 3rd and 4th years. I've really enjoyed being on my family's cell phone plan up until now, so it would be a shame to have to get my own plan :/

 

[tdram]

You can also try asking T mobile what's up with the service at your hospital. If this is a problem many people reported, maybe they have a plan to fix it?