At least twice, a Democratic state delegate in Maryland used Zoom to attend virtual state committee hearings while she was in an operating room performing surgery on patients, the Baltimore Sun reports.

Delegate Terri Hill, a plastic surgeon in Howard County, Maryland, participated in a March 12th hearing of the House of Delegates Health and Government Operations Committee for about an hour.  The video of her showed operating theater lights and multiple people wearing surgical garb.  It never showed the patient or identified what procedure the patient was undergoing.

In February, Hill phoned in to a House Environment and Transportation Committee using Zoom, having stepped away from a patient in surgery to participate briefly.   Like all state committee meetings, both meetings were streamed live on YouTube and the committees’ webpages. 

Hill says she had the patients’ permissions to participate in the meetings while they were in surgery.

“I’m a little surprised that this is becoming a big deal because there are no privacy issues. There are no attention-to-duty issues and there’s no dereliction-of-duty issues,” she said. “So, the only issue is people’s perception of what could or could not or must or must not have been going on.”

Democratic House Speaker Adrienne A. Jones said in a statement: “I understand part-time legislators have other responsibilities during the 90-day session, but I strongly encourage members to not participate in hearings or voting sessions if they aren’t able to be fully attentive to the issues before them.”