Table 4 Summary of the key studies on pages and calls placed to residents

Libby et al. [9]

56 days

Medical service

564 calls (pager)

Importance of call

Nearly 60% of the calls were not relevant to patient care.

13 interns

The majority of beeper calls do not affect immediate patient management.

Katz et al. [10]

91 days

Internal medicine service in 3 teaching hospitals

1206 calls (pager)

Urgency and reasons of pages, and activities interrupted by pages

65% of the pages interrupted patient care.

39 interns

Reducing the number of unnecessary pages and postponing nonurgent ones could result in as much as a 42% decrease in the disruption of patient care.

Harvey et al. [11]

1 week

2 teaching hospitals

309 calls (pager)

Number and nature of calls

The most common reasons were prescribing medications (42%), direct patient assessment (25%), and reporting of laboratory results (18%).

10 interns

Paging frequently interrupts work and rest at night.

Beebe et al. [14]

4 months

Multiple services in one children hospital Nurses

849 calls (pager)

Urgency rating of calls

Nurses’ ratings of the urgency of calls are not good predictors of physician response.

Wong et al. [16]

6 weeks

GIM service

6392 calls^$

Proportion of text pages, sources of page, page disruption, satisfaction

52% were text pages.

All health staff

(alpha-numeric pager)

93% of the pages among physicians were text pages.

There was a 29% reduction in disruptive pages sent during educational rounds.

Patel et al. [19]

18 months

General surgery service

9843 calls (pager)

Sender type, message type, Page quality

As pager volume increased, there was a decrease in the number of pages received per patient.

6 interns

At higher patient volumes, there was a trend toward an increasing percentage of urgent pages per patient.