Can anyone else hear that strange, ringy noise?

Phone calls at work can be a right royal pain! In fact, if there’s no admin staff around then phones tend to ring…. and ring…. and ring….

To make things more frustrating, when a phone rings at the desk you can bet that if you eventually pick it up, you’ll get “Hi there, is Dr ##### there?” (the doctor sitting in front of the phone!)

I’m beginning to wonder if there is a unit of study at med school called “tuning out external noise-101″ or something…

Hello!? Can anyone else hear that loud ringing noise repeating itself x 100?

While I’m on the subject of phone calls, a recent post at allnurses suggested that floor nurses don’t answer phones very often either…

My own experiences with this is that phone calls are troublesome, time-consuming and difficult from a legal perspective.

You can’t really say anything about a patient’s condition over the phone, the family are much better off speaking to the patient themselves. Better still, come in and visit!

The whole situation often ends up becomes more of a phone answering service. The switchboard offloads the phone call to the department, who offloads it to the acute care area, who offloads it to the nursing staff, who offload it to the nurse looking after the patient, who is right in the middle of cannulating and taking bloods, who then has to juggle the phone down to the patient after muttering stupid lines like “well things are going fine but I can’t really say much over the phone….”