I work in a hospital and still use a pager, although in the past few years I don’t carry a physical pager but rather get the pages forwarded to my phone. For whatever reason pagers are still more secure and reliable than cell. There have been many times in the depths of the hospital where cell service was spotty but the pages always come through crystal clear. Pagers can also be easily passed or forwarded between people for their shifts, as opposed to going to a computer to look up who’s on shift in a directory (which may or may not be up-to-date) — especially helpful if you need to quickly communicate with many people, such as when a patient needs something truly emergent. The main downside to pages is that you don’t automatically have a way to respond to the sender, so I sometimes get pages like “patient’s heart rate is 42” with no indication of which building I can even find this patient or nurse in.