Hospital Pager Identification Codes

[Jaded Soul]

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Is there a standard system for identification codes in all hospitals? In the hospital I'm rotating through now, when paging someone on your team, med students enter *4 after the extension number, interns = *6, residents = *8, attendings = *88. That way, when the receipient gets beeped they know who is calling them.

I've never seen anything written explaning this system, so I was wondering if it's unique to this institution or if it's widely used. If it is widely used, are there anymore ID codes besides the four I listed above?

 

[doepug]

That sounds like a good system... but what happens when you have more than one student/intern/resident on the team?

At our hospital, it's standard practice to enter a callback number, followed by * and your own pager number.

 

[ependymoma]

It's definitely an interesting system, and one I've never heard of. At every hospital I ever rotated through, both as a student and as a resident, it was common to post one's own pager # after the callback number (except when paging attendings; they just got confused by that). The only other thing I can think of is that in most systems, a page followed by "911" means emergency. The trauma service I rotated on as a student used that to alert students of trauma calls, as we were not provided with trauma pagers. On other services it either means call back right now or get here right now.

Take care

 

[southerndoc]

Originally posted by doepug
At our hospital, it's standard practice to enter a callback number, followed by * and your own pager number.

Same here.

 

[Jaded Soul]

For all the people who leave your own pager # after the callback #, do you have pagers issued by the hospital that work within the system? All students here have pagers from outside that require dialing calling an outside line, otherwise, we'd be leaving the callback number plus 10 more digits after every single page, which would be a huge hassle. I guess the point with our system is to know the rank of who's paging you so you know just how quickly to have to get to a phone and return the page.

 

[Twiki]

At our hospital, #7 is the universal code for "resident" This way, the residents have a heads up as to who is calling.

When I was a third year, one jerk of a surgery resident insisted that if we lowly medical students were to page him, we must add a *zero at the end (ya know, because we were such "zeros"). Then, he would maybe call us back if he felt like it.

 

[Winged Scapula]

The gen surg residents at my hospital use the system of entering our pager number after the extension (no * preceding it). However, not everyone always uses this system and only the residents use it - the attendings don't.

 

[ckent]

At my hospital, a lot of residents do *111 to indicate that the page is non-urgent/or a fellow resident paging. You'd think that they would be advanced enough to give everyone an identification number, then all you'd have to do is * type that in and then your name and service would appear on the other person's pager. Wishful thinking though I guess.

 

[edmadison]

At our school, the convention is for the residents to indicate their year after the page. Thus the interns use *1 or *111. That leaves the lowly medical students with, you guessed it, *000.

Ed

 

[anonymousEM]

there was one team i was on that used *636363 for GI rounds (as in meet me in the cafeteria) but it was just in their own dept

 

[shag]

All I can say is: Thank God we have text pagers.... We either send a text page via the web or have our call center send a number followed by our last name. A search page is available to find pager numbers for specific people.

 

[Tazmaniac]

I go to the same hospital Jaded Soul does.

If you don't put *4 (MS) or *6 (Intern) *8 (Res) or *9 (Attdng), then the resident paged will often ignore the page because it's a nurse or office personnel.

-Todd MSIV USC

 

[chicamedica]

Wow, my school doesn't have anything like this. . .it sure would help though--lot sof times I hesitate to page people b/c it's a non-emergency.