Disruption caused by the house officer's bleep: a simple solution

For a 'control' week, all bleep calls a surgical house officer received were charted without the nurses' knowledge and graded according to an arbitrary scale of usefulness. Also recorded were time of day, the person bleeping and whether the house officer was involved in patient care. A system was then tried in a later 'test' week, whereby only the nurse in charge would bleep the house officer and a board was placed on the house officer's own two wards where tasks could be written. Again all calls were recorded. This led to a decrease in inappropriate bleep calls from the nurses (58 per cent falling to 15 per cent p < 0.01) and a fall in numbers of nurses' bleep calls by two-thirds before 5 pm (p < 0.01). There was also a decrease in the number of bleeps when the house officer was directly involved in patient care (46 per cent falling to 28 per cent). The nurses in charge were agreeable to the changes. The entire study was repeated by another house officer with similar results. There has been little research on the disruption caused by the bleep and we believe that by this simple policy the house officers' day can be disrupted far less.