Bleeps were once a revolutionary piece of technology. They offered a simple, low-cost and relatively secure way of alerting clinicians to urgent messages without having to physically locate them in a busy hospital. The mass adoption of bleeps in hospitals happened in the 1970s–1980s at a time when mobile phones weighed more than a kilogram and the internet was still in its infancy. Yet here we are, decades later, in an era of 5G and artificial intelligence, where each of the five NHS hospitals I’ve worked in over my first three years as a resident doctor used bleeps as the primary mode of communication. This is despite Matt Hancock’s 2019 announcement that the NHS would phase out the use of bleeps by 2021.
Receiving bleeps: Interruptive, inefficient and indistinct
During my ENT rotation as a Foundation Year 2 doctor, I carried the tertiary referral bleep for the region, fielding calls from GPs, emergency departments, and in-hospital colleagues. Balancing on-call responsibilities, patient reviews and completing procedures was difficult. I would often find myself midway through a delicate task only to hear the dreaded bleep go off. At that point, I had two choices: either stop the procedure and risk patient discomfort or continue and delay responding to the call.
To make matters worse, the bleep provides no information about the nature or urgency of the call. The call could be about a life-threatening issue requiring urgent input or something as mundane as prescribing paracetamol. The only way to find out? Abandon your current task, locate a landline and return the bleep – leaving the patient mid-procedure. This kind of fragmented working isn’t just frustrating – it’s unsafe and inefficient.
Sending bleeps: A game of cat and mouse
The situation isn’t much better on the other side of the bleep.
Sending a bleep means being tethered to a hospital landline, hoping your call will be returned in a timely manner – which it often isn’t, due to competing clinical demands. By the time a return call is made, the sender might have stepped away, setting off a cycle of missed connections and more wasted time. On average, bleeps are estimated to waste 30–60 minutes per clinician per shift: time that could be spent at the bedside.
It is even worse for outside referrers. GPs trying to contact me as the on-call ENT doctor would be put on hold by switchboard until I answered the call. If they hung up the line before I answered, I would have no way of contacting them again. If I managed to get to a hospital landline in time to receive the call, they would need to relay the patient information and often have to wait again for me to contact the registrar to clarify what advice should be given. I would then bleep my registrar and take the referrer’s mobile number to contact them back. This system becomes unworkable for the GPs tasked with keeping to 10-minute consultations.
A better way
The demands on clinicians have changed since the 1980s and we need to leverage modern technology to keep pace with these changes.
CAREFUL is a secure, modern communication and task management platform built for the realities of today’s clinical workflows. It provides a simple, intuitive alternative to pagers that enables secure communication across teams, hospitals and specialities.
1. Smarter task management
Stop clinicians from being interrupted by non-urgent tasks like prescribing medications. With CAREFUL, staff members can create and assign tasks to the responsible clinician’s digital task list. No more bleeps interrupting consultations or procedures for non-urgent requests.
2. Secure messaging
With CAREFUL’s secure messaging system, clinicians can send and receive secure messages and images in real time, making it possible to instantly assess the urgency of a task with visible message previews.
3. Contact colleagues quickly
Need to speak to a specific colleague urgently? CAREFUL provides a secure, up-to-date directory of staff contacts. You can call their mobile device directly or chat via the platform’s chat function – no more rounds of bleep-and-wait, no more hospital phone relay.
Final words
Bleeps may have once been a symbol of efficiency – but today, they are a clear obstacle to modern clinical practice. They fragment care, delay communication and waste thousands of clinical hours every year.
It’s time for healthcare to move beyond outdated systems. CAREFUL offers a secure and practical alternative that respects clinicians’ time and enhances patient care.
Let’s stop being interrupted by 1980s tech and start using modern technology to help clinicians work more efficiently.
