Could you imagine how many calls a hospital gets a day? One local couple knows all too well, as they learned first-hand.

Peggy Hammond has had the same phone number for 40 years, but eight months ago, she found her number was listed as someone else’s — Duke Hospital.

“They would say, I googled you, and one lady said she had an app and she looked under business and this was the number listed for Duke Hospital,” Hammond said.

If you go to Duke’s website, they don’t have the Hammond’s number listed, but websites like Yahoo, The Real Yellow Pages have the Hammond’s home number listed as Duke Hospital.

“And they are usually looking for a patient,” Hammond said.

She said the worst part was calls at all hours.

“In the morning we’ve gotten them, 2:30 in the morning, gotten them 7:30 in the morning, those are the worse ones,” she said. “It’s frustrating because it is hard to go back to sleep at 4:30 when you wake up at 4:30, sort of disruptive and going back to sleep is not that easy.”

The Hammond’s said they tried to get the calls to stop.

“We have tried calling Google and usually what happens with that is they put us on hold and they never come back to us,” Hammond said.

So they called ABC11 and we reached out to several websites that have the Hammond’s number listed as Duke Hospital. They all told us they get their information from third parties, and have removed the incorrect listing and contacted their content providers concerning the error.

As for the Hammond’s, they said the calls for Duke Hospital have been few and far between since we got involved.

All of the companies we talked with said it takes some time for the number to be removed.

Contact Troubleshooter Diane Wilson
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