News

Cellphone use does not interfere with medical equipment and should be allowed in hospitals, according to a study that turns years of warnings on its head.

The study comes amid a sharp debate within the medical profession, with some institutions beginning to loosen their rules while others stick to the view that the devices can be dangerous to patients.

A spokeswoman for Vancouver Coastal Health said last night that cellphones and other handheld communication devices continue to be banned near sensitive equipment there, including ventilators and incubators.

While a few hospitals have begun to buck the trend, conventional wisdom supports the VCH's view that these devices could interfere with crucial equipment.

Typical of this concern were warnings from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission that electromagnetic waves from cellphones could shut down electronic devices in hospitals.

These fears were firmly enough entrenched to have made their way into popular legend.

According to an e-mail that made the rounds in 2003, a young girl died during a routine operation because "some idiot" used a cellphone near the operating theatre.

"Be compassionate," this e-mail went on to urge. "Do not use your hand phone at any hospital or places where you are told not to use it. You might not be caught in the act, but you might have killed someone without knowing it."

That message was later debunked by snopes.com (an Internet site about urban legends), and, according to a study released by the Mayo Clinic, the fears it addresses are groundless.

Noting that decisions to ban the devices in hospitals "have not been based on any rigorous testing," researchers decided to assess the effect of using cellphones near about 200 different types of medical devices. In the first half of last year, they used two different models of Nokia phone to perform tests in 75 patient rooms at their facility in Rochester, Minn.

"The incidence of clinically important interference was 0 per cent. . . . When cellular telephones are used in a normal way, no noticeable interference or interactions occurred with the medical devices," states the paper published in the March issue of the Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

The result was the same when researchers carried out a smaller number of tests with two other hand-held devices, both models of BlackBerry.

That result will come as no surprise to Mississauga's Trillium Health Centre, which decided two years ago to relax the cellphone ban and where staff have actually started using hand-held devices to communicate with each other.

Chris O'Connor, director of medical informatics in the ICU, said the hospital needed to get beyond a paper-based system, which often relied on notes jotted on pieces of paper towel. Having seen first-hand the dangers posed by communication lapses, he has championed the hospital's testing of the BlackBerry in the ICU.

But the policy-makers at VCH are not convinced. Spokeswoman Brandy Delves said the hospital has had the same policy since 1996, banning cellphones and other hand-held communication devices in key areas. "We have reviewed all the recent literature and have decided to keep our current policy," she said last night.