Learning Pager Etiquette

Pin-Chieh Chiang -- This might sound silly, but I really did not know what was involved in using a pager, let alone actually paging someone. I remember a time when pagers were the hottest gadgets, but that was literally a decade ago. Since then cell phones have taken over and pagers have became a thing of the past.

This is of course not the case in the hospital. As far as I can tell, almost every doctor I’ve encountered carries their own pager. I frequently notice the pager when my preceptors get paged and they take a break from what they were doing to go return the call. Other than that, I never really gave pagers much more thought, until I had to page a preceptor myself.

There have been plenty of times when I couldn’t seem to locate my preceptor. I knew we were supposed to meet at a certain time but don’t know where. Or we were supposed to meet at a specific place, but he hadn’t shown up and 30 minutes had passed. Early on, I wasn't sure if I should page my preceptors or not. Somewhere in the back of my mind I had reserved paging a doctor for only life-or-death situations, and I didn’t believe I qualified. I was also worried that I would be annoying them or interrupting something extremely important. So in the beginning I would always first try to hunt down my preceptor and stake out what I thought would be the most likely locations to find him. When I worked in a team, we usually split up going to different areas of the hospital. It seemed to work well at first and then I found myself in situations where I was touring the whole hospital without any signs of my preceptor. I started to worry that I was wasting time and my preceptor would think badly of me because they did not know where I was.

So finally I got the courage to start paging my preceptors, and now I have learned the amazing truth that it’s really not a big deal. Remember to press the pound sign at the end of your page – I had to figure that out the hard way. If you leave the extension of the phone you paged from, don’t walk away from that phone – thankfully it was a colleague of mine that made this mistake and not me.

The bottom line is to learn to deal with pagers; they’ll probably always be in your life whether you’re paging someone or the one getting paged.