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Risks of mobiles: it's safe in a plane, but still not safe in a hospital. Why?

Nobody has to tell me that GSM mobile phones cause electronic interference. They do, and when the first ones came on the market, capable of generating signals up to the full 4W power limit, they generated pulses capable of making the image on a TV screen jump. They still generate interference today. But - things have changed.

In those days, any sensible engineer would have warned about using the mobiles near sensitive old analogue equipment. There was a good risk that some unknown interference would generate unknowable effects in unsuspected devices, and no earthly way of showing which ones were safe in advance.

It wasn't that GSM pulses would necessarily disrupt medical monitoring gear: it was that nobody knew which electronic box was going to work fine, and which would just die. And the response which most engineers had, at the time, was obvious: "Ban the things near sensitive equipment like stuff to monitor fire hazards, or flight controls, or hospital equipment - until we have either replaced the antiques, or shielded them properly from interference, or at least worked out which are vulnerable."

A decade later, with the Y2K frenzy well behind us, and a whole new generation of hospital gear, there really should not be any piece of sensitive instrumentation left. Not in a hospital ward, not in a London Underground station, not in a fly-by-wire plane, not in a petrol station, and not in a TV studio.

At the same time, the phones don't pose the same sort of risk. Look at the size of the first Motorola Brick phones: since then, the phone business has utterly changed. Today's light-weight mobiles survive for three days or more without a charge, simply because they never run at a power level of four watts. Actually, they probably never go over a hundredth of a watt. They would wipe their batteries out in five minutes if they did. So the level of interference they can cause is tiny.

And if there are any antique instruments running vital functions, they should by now be known to be sensitive - if they are. For example: every day, there are around 200,000 people inside the Tube at any moment, and about as many people in the air, and rather more in hospital. How many of them, do you think, remember to switch their phones off?

The answer, as any London theatre-goer or cinema enthusiast can assure you, is "some." Not "most" and in the case of the Tube, I'd say "nobody". Is it really different in hospitals? I doubt it! I certainly know hospital staff who break the rules. I've certainly gone into a hospital with my mind utterly focused on the condition of the patient I was going to visit, without ever thinking about my phone at all, never mind whether it was a risk. And I've certainly heard phones ringing on the ward.

And is this a problem? I doubt that, too.

Back in 1997 there was a study, which found mobiles only affected four per cent of devices, and only 0.1 per cent were seriously affected. That 0.1% of devices simply cannot have escaped interference by now. If they were going to malfunction, they would have done. They are exposed to phones every day. How could it be otherwise?

Even if we are naive enough to believe that doctors and nurses and other hospital staff never ever use their phones at work, that's nothing to the level of credulity required here. You'd have to believe in Fairies before you believed they all religiously pull them out of their pockets as they walk into the building, switch off, and make sure they really are dead.

What they actually do, is put them on "silent" so nobody will know they're switched on.

And those phones generate their signature interference pattern - "Dukkaduk, dukkaduk, dukkaduk" - every time they check in with the local mast.  That's several times a day, at least.

The report from Ofcom this week says that the hospital phone services need to be re-assessed - an admission that the prices charged to call out (and, especially, to call in!) are not market based rates.

I'm not blaming Premier or  Patientline for imposing the ban on mobile phones. I am, however, quite sure that the money needed to keep them going - the other services they provide, not the phone services - was something that hospital accountants counted very carefully.

So, when the budget was looked at, it was very easy to predict how it would go. "How much would we have to spend on testing every old piece of equipment, and on getting competent and responsible engineers to guarantee its performance?" and the figure would be substantial. And: "How much income would we have to find to replace the lost revenue if people could use their own mobiles?" - and again, the figure would be substantial.

They don't have that money. There is absolutely no incentive whatever for hospital managers to change the way things are. Far easier to set a trap for the next engineer: "Will you guarantee that allowing mobiles on the wards will not have disastrous consequences? Sign here!" - and no engineer is going to do that until every other engineer has agreed. I still know engineers who insist that mobile phones can cause planes to crash. I bet I know engineers who would say "It isn't safe!" if you suggested placing a call while filling up the car tank with fuel.

But the real risk is somewhere between unmeasurable, and none at all.

And so the real question is: Why is Ofcom not investigating hospitals for negligence in failing to shield their equipment from legitimate and licensed radios? Because the onus should, in 2006, be firmly on the operators of medical equipment to guarantee that they won't fail.

It is, literally, impossible to stop phones from being left on inside hospitals, unless and until everybody going in and out is searched for phones, and they are confiscated. And that is, simply, impossible. There isn't a hospital in the country that could function if everybody, in and out, had to be scanned every time they used a door. Half the doors would have to be bricked up, and the staff costs of security would match those of airports.

In a world where phones generate interference, and everybody has a phone, anybody who is operating medical equipment is negligent if they don't guarantee it is GSM-safe. Anybody who is selling medical equipment is negligent if they don't guarantee it is GSM-safe. Anybody who is maintaining medical equipment is negligent if they don't guarantee it is GSM-safe. GSM signals are a fact of life today.

And that's the bottom line.Tags:  GSM, GSM Interference, NHS, Ofcom, hospital phones, safety