Fire Tone-Out for hospitals?

[RedPenguin]

I know this might sound like a silly question but I don't understand it.

Why do hospitals and some stuff like local Red Crosses, and Colleges have Tone-Out codes? I know fire departments and EMS have them so they know when they have a call, but a hospital and college don't normally "have a call", so why do they need tone-out codes? Also why do they have station numbers? I live in Cambria County, PA and our local Red Cross, 2 hospitals, and one college, and one older-folks home, all have station numbers.

 

[landonjensen]

Its not a silly question at all, im actually wondering now too. Good question !

I know this might sound like a silly question but I don't understand it.

Why do hospitals and some stuff like local Red Crosses, and Colleges have Tone-Out codes? I know fire departments and EMS have them so they know when they have a call, but a hospital and college don't normally "have a call", so why do they need tone-out codes?

 

[mancow]

So they can page their on call personnel, just as any other organization would use it.

 

[gatekeep]

The Tone-outs for the hospitals here are/have [been] (to my knowledge) NEVER used, but do exist, I assume they would be used in MCI (Mass Casualty Incident) instances to call personnel.

 

[Thunderbolt]

The University of Michigan Medical Center, uses tone-outs to alert their E.R. Trauma Team, of an incoming critical case. They all carry Motorola Minitor V, pagers around the hospital grounds. Likewise, they and two other hospitals do the same for their medical helicopter crews, when an emergency activation call comes in.

73s

Ron

 

[mikewazowski]

The local hospital in my area uses two tone paging with voice all the time.

Most calls are "pickup a call on line xxxx".

Keep in mind that before alphanumeric paging came around, all paging was some form of tone.

 

[rescue161]

We used them all the time at Naval Hospital Beaufort to page everyone from housekeeping to ER staff. The only folks that had alpha pagers were the doctors. We had a remote base so after we toned out who we wanted to hear the page, we had about 14 seconds to say the message and then the transmission would end. We used Motorola Keynote pagers.

For the doctors and other Code Blue staff, we used a sort of keyboard that we typed in a message and then hit send. I hated working at that "dispatch" desk... Unless things have changed, you had to monitor a switchboard with 10 lines on it, another two-line phone, an in-house phone, a Code phone (with a LOUD bell-ringer), a HEAR EMS radio, the hospital channels (Security and EMS), Beaufort County 800 MHz radio and keep up with all of the pages that you sent out. There was usually only one person at the desk, so it would get very stressful.

Naval Hospital, Rota, Spain had the QCII tone pager transmitter, but didn't have any voice pagers as they had already migrated over to alpha for everyone. The ER staff still used HT1000s, so when we needed to get in touch with them, I'd still use the old QCII tone to "tone them out"...lol A few of the radios still had the QCII function programmed in them and would alert, but most didn't. They would always ask what the tones were for as I was the only one that would use them.

 

[DaveNF2G]

Some county dispatch centers can tone out hospitals, the Red Cross, and other agencies in the event of a disaster. In the center where I used to work, most of the tones were Motorola QuikCall I in 2x2 format. The "disaster" agencies were set up on the "civil defense group" so that their receivers activated when the group tone to activate all county fire sirens was transmitted. Each agency also had its own unique tone combination.

 

[w0fg]

Back in the day when I was CFO at our local hospital we had tone/voice pagers for x-ray, respiratory therapy, physical therapy, lab, maintenance, duty doc or P/A, and surgical nurses to name a few. I carried an HT600 and therefore heard all of them.