h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

So, why can't you use mobile phones in hospitals?

I've been told they're 'too intrusive' and i've been told that they interfere with hospital equipment.

Does anyone know the truth?

Having spent a lot of tie in hospital recently i can't imagine anything causing more anxiety and strees s on a ward than the inability to communicate and check up on the outside world, and thats not mentioning the boredom.

As for interefering with equipment - all the doctors have pagers and mobiles, and have done for 20 years or so, how come they don't interfere?

...and given that mobiles apparently interfere with fly-by-wire, i can see that they may interfere with other equipment.

So what is it that causes this interferance? What does it interfere with? And is there anyway around it?

The same question has occurred to me. Doctors rely on their pagers and also use their mobiles in their offices within the hospital, police officers also have their radios on when visiting hospitals. Ambulance drivers/paramedics have their mobiles on and are surrounded by 'sensitive' equipment. I strongly suspect it is more to do with banning the intrusiveness of the phones than the potential harm they may do to the equipment.

On a more cynical note, if you are in hospital these days, you have to purchase a phone card to use their special phones provided (with a very costly call rate) and anyone phoning you has to call on a special (premium rate?) 0708 number. By banning the use of patients' mobiles, there is certainly much money to be made by the hospitals.

More and more estabishments are banning phones on the basis they may interfere with equipment, the most recent one I have found is my bank. Unfortunately, the more places that ban mobiles on the pretext that they may interfere with equipment, the less notice people are going to take of them.

Actually, I've just checked and my local hospitals (premium) number is 0702, not 0708.

I spoke to someone who works with commercial pilots and they did say they could tell when someone used a phone on - board.

Off course, the real reason to post here is to once again remind you all that there is NO danger of explosion in using your mobiles at petrol (gas) stations - check my page for links to relevant de-bunking pages.

But, of course there is a tiny risk that if you do use the phone then you'll interfere with the pumps electronics and end up paying more or less for the fuel.

CH

In our hospital its old fashioned 'wheely' phones and 10p pieces. And the tarrifs for payphones are some 3-4 times higher than rental lines - this charge is made by BT rather than the hospital.

The is an enormous amount of stress and tension caused to patients by not being able to use a phone / e-mail etc. People with distant families to inform / keep tabs on. People who run their own businesses. It's so easy when you're isolated to be covinced that the world outside will grind to a halt without you, and a few simple phone calls to reassure yourself, or organise a little help would make all the difference. An awful lot of people 'pretend' they are better than they are so they can get out and sort things out at home, only to be readmitted a few days later. It's an awful situation.

And it would also releive the tedium of hospital, which leads to anxiety and depression. I mither about this a lot on my space.

Perhaps the way forward is to have little communication bays, where you can go and get on-line, send texts and e-mail, and feel a little connected again.

I agree with what you are saying autist, but at the same time there has to be a line drawn somewhere. There should be a room (like a day room but more of a "communications" room) where you can go and switch on your mobile for a chat. BUT it must be switched off outside of that room. Can you imagine lying in your bed after a serious operation or illness and all you kept hearing were various mobile phone ringtones. It would drive me mad. It already drives me mad on the train, but in hospital it would be be unbearable.

So a rule to have the things on silent or whatever - provided that they're not going to interfere with equippment. But a communications room should be a goal for all hospitals.

As should a gym. I come out of hospital so unfit, after weeks of enforced lieing in bed and injections to prevent blood clots!

When you have a mobile phone on it periodically "checks in" with the base station. This causes an interference often refered to as the "galloping horses" because of the noise it makes if you have a radio on when it does this. Unfortunately this interference also happens to heart monitors and may set them off...which means doctors and nurses running around with crash trolleys.

So is there any way in which you can connect your mobile to some kind of external antenna, unscrewing you own ariel and conecting it to one on the roof of the building or whatever?

Mobile phones are capable interfering with life-support equipment, among other things, and thus could potentially kill people in hospital. Police radios are the same, although I believe the normal analogue radios are okay on receive mode, just not when transmitting. The new digital radios are as bad or worse than mobile phones.

Incidentally, police radios also interfere with electronic roadside breathalysers, causing false positives. With an analogue radio, this only happens if an officer hits the transmit button at the wrong time, but with a digital one it happens randomly, which causes problems... I'm not sure if they've found a solution yet, but one force who're trialling digital radios had to switch to the old-style breathalysers for a while. I shall have to ask.

But in summary, mobile phones in hospital are theoretically capable of killing people. They're also theoretically capable of igniting petrol vapour on garage forecourts, so you mustn't use one there either.

I once wondered why pagers were allowed, but not mobile phones - but it's because mobiles send signals *and* receive, and doctors' pagers can *only* receive. The signal generated from pagers on reception is much smaller than mobile phones when they send a signal, and are thus not likely to fiddle with equipment.

The reason why doctors can use them in their offices and in out patients clinics is that often, these areas are far enough away from the wards to have any effect on equipment - and in most hospitals now, there should be 'mobile phone areas' where it is safe for people to use their mobile phones without it having any effect on equipment.

The idea of having a "special room" on the ward where you could turn on your mobile has a flaw... As it would have to be screened to prevent the transmissions from affecting sensitive recording equipment, the phones couldn't get a signal...

When a mobile phone is called, it sends a powerful signal in the microwave band, transmitting its status to the nearest base station. Pagers and analogue Police radios don't do that - they just "listen" to signals. A police radio could cause a lot of damage in a hospital if it was used to transmit. Why else do you think doctors carry pagers, and run to fixed land lines, when a mobile would be much more convenient?

EEG equipment, for example, tries to record signals measured in microvolts at a patient's scalp; one mobile phone ringing in the vicinity could scramble data for a distance of several wards, and possibly damage the apparatus itself if it was close enough.

I understand that mobiles can cause real disturbance to hospital equipment, but why then are the doctors allowed to use them in their hospital offices, and police allowed to use their radios within the hospital? And yesterday when visiting a friend in a maternity ward, the ward security guard had a walkie-talkie and a mobile both which were both switched on.

The thing is most people I know who have been in hospital have sneaked their mobiles in and used them 'under the covers' with the sound switched off. Providing a day room away from sensitive equipment for the use of mobiles would probably cut down their illicit use and be far safer.

It's because, as I explained, some hospital equipment is so sensitive that it would literally be destroyed by a mobile phone ringing near it. Just carrying a switched-on mobile runs the risk that someone will call you while you're walking past such equipment, wrecking it and corrupting data which might be vital to a life-saving diagnosis for the patient to which it is attached. And the signal is strong enough to cause this sort of damage through a wall, so just because you're in a room full of people with broken legs doesn't mean that there isn't a vital EEG taking place next-door.

It's like saying "I should be allowed to swing a gun with the safety off anywhere in the hospital, so long as I don't actually intend to fire it when anyone is around".

So what is it that causes the radio feild (sorry - not a technichal term) that IS the interference? Is it a mechanism in the phone itself, is it the broadcast from the arial?

If hospital beds were provided with an arial socket which you screwed into your phone arial so the transmission was done up on the buildings roof, would that avoid the problem?

Autist, I don't know which Trust you're under, but around London, there's a scheme called 'PatientCall', which you can make outgoing calls from the phone beside your bed; you buy a card, with 'credits' on it, and use it much like a BT phonecard I think. It can also receive incoming calls too, as it has a full landline number - and this is free, as far as I know. So that may be one way around it.

As per doctors offices and clinics, I don't know if I made this clear in my last post, but doctors' offices are on a separate floor, or in a separate wing of the hospital, away from the wards. Outpatients' clinics are again, in a different wing, or often, in a separate building, away from the wards.

The issue here is not that patients will drop dead if you use a mobile phone, but that it alters readings and damages equipment. In the former issue, this can result in incorrect treatment being given due to incorrect readings (garbage in garbage out), and with the latter issue, equipment is expensive these days.

I don't know why they don't do what they do here in Germany. Every bed has a phone jack, when you go in (checking in for planned stuff, as soon as possible for emergency admissions) you are asked if you want a phone. The units are slightly more expensive than normal phone charges, but they can receive any amount of incoming calls.

When I was admitted for an emergency, I can tell you that being able to call/be called saved my sanity.

That is what they are doing now - sorry if I didn't make that clear

Witty Ditty, actually the issue is that patients will drop dead if you use a mobile phone: defibrillators, syringe pumps and external pacemakers are all susceptible to RF interference.