Private numbers

beauf wrote: »

I take your point. However the only people with a minimal of influence on the officialdum in a hospital are senior consultants. But even then I've run into to problems with difficult public secretaries and administrators who seem to do things counter to the consultants wishes. In one case a family member couldn't get on to a list because a paper pusher seemed to blocking the process for months. Only when I threatened to hand deliver the paper work to this person into their hand did they "process" the paperwork. All the medical staff were entirely frustrated by it.

Which, with respect, is an entirely different problem, however frustrating, and
I know it can be. But it really only muddies the waters here.

steinbock123 wrote: »

I’m highly amused at people complaining about private numbers.
I’m old enough to have lived at a time when mobile phones weren’t even thought of, never mind invented, and back then , when the phone rang , you just answered it, obviously as someone was calling you.
Why it’s deemed necessary to know who’s calling in advance before you answer these days is beyond me. I get that it’s a neat feature to see who’s calling, but private number coming up would never stop me answering the phone.

The difference is that the phone is with you all the time. Phone behaviour should change accordingly.

I'm not a fan of talking on the phone. I rarely answer calls even when the number shows! I don't have voicemail setup as I don't want to return a voice call. Messages are the way to go for me.

cdeb wrote: »

They're also a problem, but one you can't control.

An IT department would be a really obvious start for discussing an IT issue. The change being suggested isn't necessarily a major one. So why not make the suggestion instead of being another "Not my problem" person?

cdeb wrote: »

Yep, and that's fine if true.

But at least you'll have made what genuine efforts you can and will have someone else to give out about on internet forums. You don't have to "go on a crusade", as suggested, and try to bring down the IT department.

And the idea that someone wouldn't even know where to go with an IT issue in their organisation (which was the original query) doesn't really stack up.

I’m the one who said I wouldn’t know where to start about who to talk to. My thinking is thus: for starters is it an IT issue? Or a phones issue? Technical services? Is there such a department within the hospital that deals with the phone system rather than the computer system? I don’t know. If it’s tech services, there isn’t a ‘tech services’ email/phone number so I would have to find someone who knew the name of someone in tech services and go from there. If it’s IT who deal with it, our IT helpdesk is regionalised, so they deal with maybe 6 different hospitals, probably more actually, I’m not sure, and they have levels of triage for queries. I can’t imagine this one being a high priority. When they get round to addressing it, nobody in IT is going to go about changing the system on the request of one doctor. They wouldn’t have the authority to do that and neither do I have the authority to order it be done. That would have to come from someone else- who? My line manager or theirs? Or someone senior in the hospital admin dept? Or the hospital manager themselves? I’ve no idea. And believe me, if I ever get to have a meeting with the hospital manager, there are many many things higher on my agenda than making allowances for people who don’t want to answer their phones. Things like replacing the specialist nurse on my team who has been out sick following major surgery last December. Things like allocating a social worker who can deal with complicated discharges. Things like giving me the resources to do my job to the highest standard. Things like providing locum cover so I can take my leave without the service grinding to a halt for a week, and without having to put in many extra hours the weeks before and after my leave to try and minimize the impact of my time off.

So finding out who to ‘ping an email’ to or who to ring about this is not a quick task and just not something I have the time or energy for when more important things have been dealt with, tbh.

km991148 wrote: »

Sounds like it would be easier for all if the switchboard didn't do this.

That's the problem with everything in the health service. Everyone knows that procedures are crazy/ridiculous, but "that's the way it's always been done" and fixing it is always Somebody Else's Problem. So nothing ever gets done and we continue to pay through the nose for a service that veers between inefficient and shambolic.

Deleted User wrote: »

If I answered, or called back, every phone call I have ever got I’d be out a pretty penny.

If you answered in the first place, you wouldn't need to call back.

cdeb wrote: »

So contact IT and ask them. Or log a call with the helpdesk. It doesn't matter how long it takes them to reply; you've done what you can. There's no point pleading unfamiliarity with the system you work in, or not even bothering trying to improve things. If everyone takes your approach and has "better things to do", nothing will change. If a few people start using existing structures to suggest improvements, things will change.

So a hospital should replace/upgrade their IT system because a few millenials are afraid to answer the phone? It is likely an intentional policy introduced to stop folk tormenting extremely busy doctors, consultants and nurses with trivial, mundane things at inopportune times. I doubt they will consider a change, especially when many organisations have KPIs against calls answered, feedback given by certain time frames, etc. Why bother having a phone if you don't answer it or use its primary function?

Deleted User wrote: »

The one that hang up - should I call them back?

Do people answer every call from ever number they get? I’m surprised anybody is defending that position frankly.

Use common sense. If someone rings you and they hang-up, wwhy would you call them back?

Deleted User wrote: »

Who says it’s millennials. Surely the most likely people to get phone calls from hospitals are older.

The whole attitude here stinks and does say a lot about the health service, and it’s defenders, that the problem is assumed to be the clients of the health service and not the health service itself. This is an essential industry and it has customers who act in a certain way which the industry can’t change. The reaction is to continue to blame the users rather than fix the problem.

In my experience, its the younger generations. They're far too comfortable sending messages and emails that often get overlooked than actually talk to someone and confirm that they have the information they require. Most of the older generations will answer (unless previously subjected to harassment) because that's how they always used telephony and because they enjoy conversation more than most. They are also more likely to answer if they expect a call because they aren't as "busy".

The health services are broken for a lot of reasons but pinning it on private phone numbers or a switchboard is not sensible at all. In fact, it's the least of its problems. The current process likely was derived from necessity than legacy arrangements, for reasons discussed above. I'm more astonished that you seem to think it'd be better for organisations to upgrade expensive IT equipment so that a few sensitive people can ignore them anyway for some other nonsensical reason than spend their money on useful equipment or services. Let's face it, the folk who don't answer private numbers probably aren't in a rush to answer numbers they don't recognise either and no one has access to every number worldwide to tell them of the legitimacy of same.

Deleted User wrote: »

Why would I answer every call to begin with? I mean I don’t even answer calls of people I know when I’m busy.

So I am using common sense. If I don’t know you I don’t answer. Leave a voicemail. The only exception is if I am expecting a delivery. This has caused me exactly no problems.

Because you gave your phone number as the method you wished to be contacted by.

It's a phone, an internationally recognized instrument of communication and up to the advent of smart phones that communication was always verbal. It's not the callers fault that you're too important or busy to answer.

Hate private numbers. Reminds me of something similar....

I have a relative who did well for herself in England. Swapped bleak 1970's Ireland for the English upper middleclass by climbing the greasy social status pole and marrying well. It's like a foreign land when it comes to the class of time wasting that was once at Olympic levels in Ireland, and still is in rural Ireland; that of the unannounced caller to the door and even worse, the unannounced caller who stays for hours and just won't leave. Even the most mundane Sunday morning coffee meeting is scheduled a week before hand and there's an unspoken time limit that people observe without even thinking about it. Everything is pre-planned, people arrive on time and go on time. It's fantastic.

Official/business calls aside, the whole thing of people purposely hiding their number so they can a) catch you on the hop with some BS you don't want to deal with b) waste your time for no reason when in the modern age a simple text or whatsapp would do, is infuriating.
Some people love their phone and it thrills their heart when it's beeping ceaselessly with more possibilities for "chats". Some of us wish we could drop the thing in the toilet for at least one day a week and get a bit of peace.

notsoyoungwan wrote: »

It’s not about secrecy, it’s about filtering access to the doctors. If the public had a direct line to a doctor, the doctor would spend more time dealing with calls and less time seeing/treating patients. All calls to a doctor should go through a switchboard or a secretary.

My secretary was off on leave during the midterm recently and her phone was diverted to another secretary who was new to the department and didn’t really know the running of things and specifically didn’t know anything about my service, which is a sub-specialty within the department and run quite differently to the other teams. Neither did she know any of the patients/their relatives, and with the nature of my job there are a few regulars we hear from frequently. My normal secretary filters most stuff so that about 5% of calls she takes come to me. The week she was off, about 80% of the calls came my way, usually by means of an email from the new secretary asking me what to do about something or to phone someone. I’m not being arrogant when I say I simply don’t have time for that and neither does any other doctor.

I understand the issue of a doctor not revealing a direct line, but there is zero reason why a switch/admin contact number can't be displayed so that the patient has some hope of calling back - patient care is a two way process, communication has to be effective from both sides.

As an aside, in a recent related case, I eventually managed to return a private number medical call to a hospital department, after several days of contacting various other departments to track the source down. The number I was eventually given to call back on, played out a voicemail announcement with no option to leave a message, this happened for a week of calling daily. In the end I managed to get through to a switch operator on another number that placed my call straight away.

There is obviously the common people number that answers on a pot luck basis and the internal hotline that always answers. That's not a very patient focused approach.

tjhook wrote: »

For people who don't answer calls from private numbers - do you answer calls from numbers you don't recognise? If you do, isn't it the same thing? And if you don't, do you find you miss a lot of calls from your bank/hospital/online vendors/etc?

(I know there are apps for a phone to do a reverse lookup on any incoming number, but I doubt people are generally willing to forego their privacy for the data dredging that those apps inevitably do).

Nope. Leave a message and I might get back to you. I’ve wasted enough time in my life on “time sinks” trying to sell me something I don’t need.

My time is too important to be wasted being polite and letting someone blather on about something I don’t need.

As for phone calls in work, that’s all well and good but the caller will, inevitably, ask me to send them an email to “confirm” what I’ve told them. If they’re smart, that is. Always CYA.

I’ll usually instruct them to just email me in future, as a lot of the time it’s something that can wait and doesn’t warrant me “sorting” it straight away.

Work smarter, not harder, folks.

beauf wrote: »

Phones are often busy or out of range. It's not 100% reliable. If you ring and can't get someone, you should have a backup means of communication. Not be a jobsworth and give up saying I've done my bit.

...

That's a good general point - it's good to have multiple ways to contact somebody. Even an email address can be miscommunicated or incorrectly recorded. And unlike with a phone call, the sender might never know. Anyway, presumably when a person provides their contact details, they know whether they've provided one or multiple communication mechanisms, and what those are.