Do cell phones really screw up hospital equipment??

Factual Questions
41

Pagers are usually receiver devices, only responding to signals that are normally going through the atmosphere anyway. That’s why doctors that are paged then go to a land-line phone to call whoever is paging them.

I’m a courier who uses a pager, cell phone, and a Nextel walkie-talkie phone. I either turn off the last two, or just leave them in the car when I go to a hospital. I can also use an 800 number to contact my dispatcher from within the hospital to expidite routing.

(I also leave all my electronics in the car when I go to a courthouse, but that’s because it’s such a pain in the ass to take them all off to go through security.)

42

Hospitals use isolated power systems in what they call “wet” locations (operating rooms, etc). All of the red outlets you see in hospitals are fed from isolation transformers. The type of fault in question here is a ground fault, where either conductor after the isolation transformer is shorted to ground, in which case you can have no more than 5 mA of fault current (I had to look up the number, the one I gave from memory wasn’t very accurate it turns out).

The 5 mA number comes from what is believed (without a whole lot of evidence behind it) to be the highest amount of current that can pass across the heart and not kill the patient.

Most of the standards for isolated systems came out of patients dying during the early days of open heart surgery. A lot of it is guesswork because its pretty much impossible to tell if a patient died from electric shock or if they died from the surgery itself. It parallels the cell phone debate in a way because you had a lot of people arguing with very few facts and the general concensus is to just to do what we think is safe even if some people think it’s unnecessary and going too far.

43

One more thing, Cnote. As a hospital employee and a once hospital courier, I can assure you that telephones are plentiful within any modern hospital. It isn’t like you are being completely restricted from access to the outside. You make it sound as if not being able to use your cellphone completely isolates you.

Sheesh.

It’s attitudes like this that make me loathe Cellphoneites.

If a place says Turn off the Cell Phone then turn the stupid thing off. All this blather of needing it in an emergency is just that. blather. The world got on fine before them. If you really need to be in touch with whomever, then don’t go where cell phones are banned. And if you MUST go there, then get the number there where you can be reached.

44

Sheesh back attcha, particlewill.

When I was in Arizona, about two years ago helping my grandmother, I didn’t exactly want to: a) call collect whenever the family needed to be informed, b) carry around a boatload of change whenever I used the pay phone, and/or c) pay the exorbitant fees that hospitals charge (Or whoever owns the phone system) when making calls.

And those are only a couple of reasons.

Besides, having been on the receiving end of someone keeping me informed on a loved one, and thus being glued to the telephone for hours on end, it’d be nice if people could reach the person at the hospital and get the updates when they were prudent.

And since I’m back, the other part of me that irritates me about this discussion, is the sense that some peoples hatred for cell phones anywhere is reason enough alone to pass along (The myth being that it plays havoc with hospital equipment and will cause death to anyone with a cell who happens to near a patient).

You hate cell phones? Fine, but don’t hide behind this facade that it’s dangerous and life threatening when the threats themselves are pretty minimal.

I lied, one other thing,

Up until this thread, I assumed there were legitimate, real reasons for those signs and those policies. Part of me thought it was nonsense, simply because of people’s general attitude towards cell phones, and from what I have seen, a hell of a lot of things in a hospital that would also seem to interfere with the equipment. To me, it never added up. But, I diligently walked outside to make the calls, or get the messages, when needed.

After getting involved in this thread and learning that some of what I had believed was, in fact, true- that it’s perpetuated itself based on myth’s and real, but scattered, incidents, it’s strengthen my resolve to fight those that say, ‘But hey, it’s a rule. Those things are dangerous, blah blah blah’.

Again, you hate ‘em? Fine. But don’t come to me and tell me they’re something that they’re not.

Am I really going to tell a doctor or nurse to buzz off if they tell me not to use my phone? No. But when a rent-a-cop, or someone similar comes up and tells me their not allowed on the premises, or some other bullshit because it’s what they’ve heard, I might say a bit more.

Besides, if it really doesn’t pose the risk it’s thought to, isn’t it a waste of time for them to take time out to tell me to ‘Shut off your phone, those are dangerous in here’?

45

While there are quite a few misconceptions about the dangers of cell phones, the simple fact remains that if you use a cell phone in a hospital one of three things is going to happen.

  1. Nothing.
  2. You will interfere with equipment in a non-fatal way (such as causing readings to go haywire forcing a nurse to come running down the hall to see if the patient is really dying).
  3. You will kill someone.

The first one is most likely. The second one is rare but not all that uncommon. Number three is extremely rare, but not out of the realm of possibility.

You seem to be arguing that because number 3 is so extremely rare that the whole thing is hogwash, but the likelihood of number 2 occuring is more than enough to ban cell phones around patients, IMHO. The fact that number 3 is not impossible is also worthy of consideration, which you seem to be ignoring. That’s kind of like arguing that if you attach a bomb to a balloon and float it across the united states the chances of you killing someone are almost nil, so since its so safe you should be allowed to do it.

46

The general question, I think, has been answered as well as it is likely to be. I think we can all agree that the data on interference indicates that it is a real–though some would argue a remote–possibility. What constitutes an acceptable risk is not for us to decide, but a matter of hospital policy. Whether those policies are fair or unfair is fodder for Great Debates, not GQ. This thread is closed.

bibliophage
moderator GQ