Jan 9, 2018 3 min read

The cellphones that many of us don’t leave the house without – or sometimes even barely leave a room without – are tools of undeniable convenience.

You want movie listings? Go to your phone. Want to get back in touch with a friend you haven’t laid eyes on since the Reagan administration? The phone can help facilitate that. Even being stuck in a long, slow line at a store is no longer as agonizing as it once might have been, with the phone at the ready as a boredom-slayer.

There are downsides, though, the most prominent being a near-addictive attachment some folks have to these devices. Another was summed up succinctly by a headline in Time magazine this past summer: “Your cellphone is 10 times dirtier than a toilet seat. …”

The article went on to elucidate how microorganisms move from our fingers to our phones, in no small part because Americans check their phones, on average, 47 times per day. Emily Martin, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, told Time, “Because people are always carrying their cellphones, even in situations where they would normally wash their hands before doing anything, cellphones do tend to get pretty gross.”

That’s why the report last week in the Observer-Reporter that, until about a year ago, cellphones had been present in operating rooms at Washington Hospital on a “pervasive” basis, according to an investigation by the Pennsylvania Department of Health, was so unsettling.

Despite official hospital policy limiting cellphone use to private areas “away from patients and visitors,” the commonwealth’s Department of Health found that Washington Hospital “failed to follow the written policy for use of cellular phones.” On Dec. 8, 2016, one employee told investigators, “Yes, I see a lot of cellphones in the (operating room).” The hospital was ordered to revise its cellphone policy and emphasize those changes to the staff.

Medical facilities, both good and not-so-good, constantly battle against the threat of infection. A 2014 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 1 in 25 patients fall victim to infections they pick up in health-care settings, with unhygienic practices being the main culprit, and the overuse of antibiotics, with the resulting decrease in their effectiveness, also playing a part.

Keeping cellphones out of operating rooms is common sense.

The report grew out of a complaint by Sheila Harosky, a 15-year employee of Washington Hospital, that her genitals were photographed before a 2016 hernia operation by a scrub nurse using a cellphone. The state Health Department found that the presence of a cellphone in the operating room increased Harosky’s risk of infection.

Some schools prohibit their students from using cellphones, and the White House has just announced a ban on employees using personal phones during working hours. Restrictions have also been placed on drivers using handheld phones in some localities.

That they should be prohibited from operating rooms should be painfully obvious.