The BBC’s Emergency 24/7 highlights an overlooked part of emergency medicine: the NHS’ critical communications systems and how they are evolving
BBC Two recently launched a new series, Emergency 24/7, giving viewers a close-up and fascinating insight into how an A&E team cares for a hospital’s most critically ill patients. Multitone, which has worked with the NHS for more than seven decades, is proud to see its advanced paging systems featured prominently in both of the first two episodes, set in Southmead Hospital, Bristol. The featured NHS Trust is also working with Multitone to migrate to the new Multitone’s Nucleus™ secure platform – leveraging new technology to evolve its existing critical communications.
In Episode 1 – Bike Crash – Multitone’s pager takes centre stage as the switchboard uses code 544 to swiftly bring together a 15-strong multidisciplinary trauma team, spanning surgery, orthopaedics, anaesthetics, the blood bank and radiology, in the ten minutes before two motorbike crash patients arrive by air ambulance. During the episode, we can observe how the head of the emergency unit, Jamie, coordinates care as the team assembles in resus.
Looking ahead: how Multitone Nucleus™ is shaping the next generation of critical communications
The series highlights how proven technologies such as pagers are still used in UK hospitals, due to their reliability – a resilience that remains essential. Pagers continue to play an important role, at the same time as hospitals increasingly evolve their communications to modernise how clinicians connect – with Multitone’s Nucleus™ at the forefront.
Multitone Nucleus™ combines the proven reliability of paging with the flexibility of a secure app-based platform, giving clinical teams a single system for critical alerts, messaging and escalation – built to support hospitals like the one featured in Emergency 24/7 as they modernise, without compromising on speed or resilience.
Peter Lomax, Multitone’s Sales and Marketing Director said:
“Emergency 24/7 gives the public a rare, unfiltered look at what happens behind the scenes when every second counts – and it’s a powerful reminder of why reliability still matters so much in critical communications. Pagers have always been critical to the NHS because they simply don’t fail when it counts most. But reliability and innovation aren’t mutually exclusive. With Multitone Nucleus™, we’re helping hospitals to build on that foundation of trust, giving clinical teams the modern tools they need without ever compromising on the speed and certainty that patient safety depends on.”
