Patient Phones

 Image courtesy of Corbis

The phone system in the particular ward in which I stayed was... pretty much atrocious. It wasn't so bad to make calls, but getting calls was practically a matter of luck.

There were three phones available to patients on the unit. There used to be four, but one hasn't been working for weeks and god forbid someone fix something. All the working phones were nestled in one corner of the unit, each spaced far enough away from its neighbors to give an illusion of privacy.

To make a call out, just pick up the receiver, dial 9, and then dial the number you're trying to call. I'm not sure why it's 9 that directs outgoing calls, but it's always "dial 9," isn't it? Always. Calls are supposed to be restricted to less than 10 minutes in duration, and that rule was abided by; I never saw someone make a long phone call, despite it being our only means of communication with the outside world. No one ever seemed to want to talk to anyone on the outside for too long. I'm not really sure why.

Receiving a call was the problem. The numbers of those phones (even the broken one) are given out to patients' families upon admittance, and when one of the numbers is called, the corresponding phone rings. As one would expect.

BUT

...there's no one assigned to picking up the phone. It's left to the patients. If you're near the phones and you hear one ring, it's your responsibility to pick it up. So of course you can imagine how much that happens, right? People sitting in that corner, sometimes not even doing anything, will just sit there as the phones ring and ring into oblivion. The first few days of my stay, that was how things were. My parents were at their wit's end, because calling any of the phones wasn't getting an answer, and the nurses who picked up the nurses' station number were just generally unhelpful. It's not their job to play operator. It's the patients' -- apparently.

As a patient picking up the phone, you have to respect the other patients' privacy. You say "Hello?" and maybe a "For whom are you calling?" and a "Who may I ask is calling?" but absolutely nothing else. There's no "Hello, you've reached psychiatric Ward 3A, how can I direct your call?" As if where they're calling could possibly be a mystery. Just "Hello?" and then you go fetch whomever the call is for. (That part is why no one likes picking up the phones.) It can be quite a task, finding the person. They could be somewhere in the common area around the nurses' station, or in the kitchen, or in the TV room, or in their own room. And it's forbidden to go in anyone else's room. You just have to stand in the doorway and call inside. I once had to fetch Patient B for a phone call, and he's basically comatose. I had to repeat myself three times to get him to understand that he had a phone call. By the time I got him to the phone, the caller had hung up. C'est la vie.

I used to imagine what it'd be like to have an automated system for a psych ward's patient phones.

"Hello, you've reached Ward 3A -- the loony bin! 
Please listen carefully and make a selection.
For incoherent ramblings, please press 1.
For an emotionally-charged argument, please press 2.
For paranoid delusions, please make your death threat after the beep..."

And so on.

They could have a number assignment for all the general symptoms. That could be reduced to nine numbers, right? Anxiety, Depression, Suicidal Thoughts/Attempts, Anger Management Issues, Substance Abuse, Psychosis, Forgot To Take Their Meds, Schizophrenia, and Bipolar Disorder. That's all the biggies, anyway. Everything else is just a subcategory.

Image courtesy of Corbis.