Outpatient Surgery Magazine

OR Excellence Award Winners - September 2017 - Subscribe to Outpatient Surgery Magazine

Outpatient Surgery Magazine, providing current information on Surgical Services, Surgical Facility Administration, Outpatient Surgery News and Trends, OR Excellence and more.

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Be Smart About Smartphone Use Mitigate the legal risks of cell phones in your facility. M ost of us can't imag- ine spending a day without our pre- cious smartphones, but they pose serious challenges to a surgical facility in the form of disruptions, distractions and even risk of infection. Whether those phones are in the hands of your surgeons and staff or your patients and their accom- panying friends and family, you need to be able to answer one important question: Do the benefits of allowing uncon- ditional smartphone use in your facility outweigh the risks? Let's take a closer look. • Surgeons and staff. At times, having surgeons and staffers on their phones in or near the OR is justified — when another patient is in intensive care or there are serious post-op complications, for example — but those instances should be few and far between. An OR nurse taking a brief moment to text her child or an anesthesiologist passing the downtime by updating his Facebook status might seem like innocent indul- gences, but they can distract from the primary task of caring for the patient. Even a momentary distraction could result in the administra- 1 4 4 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 7 Legal Update William A. Miller, JD • GOOD QUESTION Do surgeons really need their phones in or near the OR?

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