Holidays are meant to be opportunities for rest and reflection, and I’m having plenty of time for that as I’ve taken leave during school holidays. This really winds up the executive, as I’ve thereby personally placed the trust’s precious 18-week target in jeopardy.
If they’re not going to allow a full-blown flu pandemic to relax the target, they’re certainly not going to be swayed by my feeble preference for spending holidays with my husband (a teacher) and daughter (a child) instead of solo, decorating the spare bedroom in the middle of November.
The timing also allows us to enjoy the family tradition of having a full-blown domestic argument while stuck in a traffic jam on the M6 north of Preston (one of the more depressing stretches of our motorway network). The argument focuses on the following points: why do we only every get to go on holiday when everyone else in the country is deliberately clogging up the M6? Should we simply turn round and go straight home again or should we try to find an alternative route? Whose responsibility was it to put the road map in the car and why haven’t we got a satnav?
The answer to the last point is “my husband”, whose responsibility it is to pack the car, and who is also solely responsible for insulating our household from any contamination by twenty-first century technology on the grounds that it would inevitably lead to loss of essential life skills. For instance, map-reading (hence no satnav), remembering to take food out of the freezer (therefore no microwave) and washing-up (no dishwasher)…
The traffic jam goes on for so long that I find myself thinking quite fondly of my neurosurgical list, which is what I should be doing at this moment if I was at all corporate in my outlook. In fact during this period of rest and reflection, I come up with several cracking ideas for improving things in theatre.
We’ve already instituted the WHO surgical checklist, which is fabulous for getting staff to actually speak to each other before they start cutting bits out of patients.
But why stop there? On a trip to Tokyo several years ago I was really struck by the habit of the theatre staff and trainees of lining up outside the operating theatre and bowing to the consultants as they arrived. We could easily institute that, and it would look great in our theatre ‘etiquette’ policy, which the executive wants to be more stringent.
On top of that is the whole thorny issue of theatre wear for those who need to leave theatre to visit their office (or occasionally the ward) during a list. I think we should introduce bright pink theatre suits for this purpose, both to discourage this undesirable activity, and to break down gender stereotyping. Not all of this is evidence-based, of course, but then the evidence-base for a lot of our spinal surgery doesn’t bear much examination, and no-one’s suggesting not doing that.
Meanwhile, I see Junction 34 approaching and we decide to take a chance and turn off - along, it turns out, with around 10,000 other people.
Perhaps redecorating the spare room isn’t such a bad idea after all. I wonder what the leave diary is like for November…
Tags: WHO
