I shouldn't really answer for Anna's call experience, but our call works something like this - we work a normal day from 8 to 5, and then we get hand over at 4:30 or so. Our call shift starts at 5. Technically, if there's nothing going on we can go for dinner. This never happens. You start with your pager going off and we are responsible for 3-5 wards in addition to whatever happens in the emergency department and whatever new consultations happen to come in from the rest of the hospital.
Most shifts, I start at 4:45 (If my clinic is over; if not, I still have to go back and see my clinic patients which are booked according to the staff person I'm working with; so it's not like I can stop booking at 3:30 pm), answering the phone to deal with day to day stuff that the day staff didn't get to, and then at 5:00 I get anywhere from 1 to 7 consults of patients I need to see that night. As I'm working through the 7 consults (taking from 1 hour to 3 hrs each), I get additional consultations coming in from the ER or the rest of the hospital. Time that with pages that come in as often as 27 in 7 minutes (oh, neurology, how I hated you), ranging from things like "Can this patient have Tylenol" to "YOU MUST SEE THIS PATIENT RIGHT NOW!!!!" to "This patient isn't breathing!" - you have to juggle family meetings, nursing concerns, patient concerns and seeing new patients, as well as holding off as many consults from the ER as possible because you are already swamped with everything else that is coming in.
By the time a shift ends, you have done about 26 to 28 hours of patient care. Before you can go home, you have to go and do all the paperwork and dictations from the night before, so it can be hour 32 or 33 before we actually "go home". And we are expected to work the next day.
And we are paid about $127 or so for this.
And one person handles all of this.
