The Parent Pager is a service provided to patients who receive their primary care at the Friend Family Health Center.  If you have continuity clinic at FFHC, you should inform parents of the available service and how they can contact the parent pager when they have a medical concern about their child. This should be done at the end of every well child and urgent care visit so our parents understand there is now a standardized method for accessing medical advice within the resident clinic.

The parent pager is covered from 8am-5pm daily by the intern on the Community rotation EXCEPT on days on which they are post-call from Night Intern cross-coverage.  This is indicated appropriately in the Amion call schedule.   At 8am, call the operator and have pager 3342 covered by your personal pager.  After 5pm,  call the operator and have the Parent Pager forwarded to the main FFHC phone number (2-0660).

Parents will reach the Parent Pager by calling the main operator for the university, then asking to page the “Pediatric Parent Pager” (3342).   The operator will then page the covering resident with the name and phone number of the parent.

As the resident answering the call, you have one of three options:

  • Give telephone advice only,  with use of the telephone triage protocol handbook which each resident will pick up in our office prior to his/her week of coverage.
  • Refer to the Comer ER.  You must call the ED attending (773-702-6249) and inform him/her about the patient you are referring. This will hopefully limit the waiting time in the ED.
  • Arrange for Urgent Care follow-up.  You will be given a binder with a form for urgent care slots which can be filled out and faxed to the FFHC urgent care office ASAP. The coordinators will put the patient in to be seen the next day in a resident urgent care appointment. If it is early in the day and you think the patient needs a same-day urgent care appointment, call the Urgent Care RN (773-795-7196) or Peds A desk (773-702-6441) and they will schedule the patient into a same-day resident urgent care slot.

Remember:  You can always reach an attending at any point in this process.  From 8am-5pm, the Teaching Attending for the resident clinic will cover any questions. It is probably best to call the FFHC workroom (773) 702-0449 to speak with the Teaching Attending. After 5pm the attending on call for FFHC will serve as back-up. You can call the FFHC general number (773) 702-0660 and tell them that you are the resident covering the Parent Pager and would like the MD to be paged.

All encounters must be documented with the telephone logs included in the binder. The forms will be hand delivered to the Friend Center each day for record. Dr. Goldstein has kindly offered to monitor the daily log forms and will give the residents feedback on their telephone triage skills. We are still discussing the optimal way to do this.