I'd be devil's advocate for a bit now. Perhaps we freak out more than we should. Don't get me wrong, proper hygiene is and infection control precautions are important but when was the last time you left your shoes at the entrance of your appartment? Those shoes that are in contact with the nasty hospital floor, where patients poop, bleed, urinate, you step into your nice appartment's carpet, rugs, floors. Your dog walks around the appartment the whole day and then jumps on your bed, licks its paws and your face. Let's be honest, we don't wipe the stethoscope 100% of the times we go into a patient's room and 100% when we walk out. Even the most germophobes of us forget from time to time. I see people freaking out about germs, and then grab a piece of gum with their hands after typing an H&P on a keyboard that would probably growth a dozen different strains of pseudomonas if cultured. The point I am trying to make is that perhaps you shouldn't necessarily be too aggressive. I personally don't touch my phone with gloves ever and for the most part my phone is either on my hands or my pocket, very rarely it is on a table and if it is on a table briefly, it is usually in an office and not a patient's room. I don't see a reason why it would be dramatically different than the phone of anyone else that does not work in a hospital environment. The reality is that all of the devises and surfaces that we touch are always covered on crap. Check the mythbuster's episode about the poop in the toothbrush.
Call me crazy (or disgusting) but my approach is more liberal in that sense. I would not necessarily clean daily (or even multiple times a day). I do wipe it from time to time, perhaps once a week or so but then again I am not dropping my phone on the floor, answering with gloves and I do practice strict hand hygiene in the hospital (while I do forget to wipe my stethoscope, I do not forget to wash my hands, 80%+ with water and soap after each patient) so I am not very scared of my phone. I wouldn't hand it to a small child to play though, that's my line =).
THANK YOU. For many years I used to simply grab the wipes, use it on my stuff and then wash my hands. All the nurses would freak out "USE GLOVES, you gonna get cancer". I was so confused, most chemical carcinogens usually are ingested or inhaled and/or require long exposures, not a 10sec contact. Also, the surface of the skin is pretty much dead, these chemicals are very volatile I doubt there is much absorption if any at all through the skin. But then I looked up the information like you did and I was further vindicated of how much crap is being said. I wonder how this rumor got started, it seems to be almost universal. It still makes sense for nurses to use gloves (not necessarily for cancer prevention, but this stuff can irritatesince and ruin their nail polish!) they use this stuff way too much (rightfully so) but my contact with it is far more sporadic and brief. Unless someone brings me compelling information to do otherwise, I really don't go out of my way to grab gloves. Im inhaling that crap anyway, if anything I'd be more concerned about inhalation than contact.
