Viewing Gallery

“Sir, they want us to fill up the details of all of our operation theaters in this format and return the documents by tomorrow morning” my lecturer told me while I was operating on an ovarian tumor. I realized it was for the inspection by the medical council. “Send it to the office, and get our professor in charge of medical council work to look at it. I will go there after the operations get over.” I called the office when I got free. The professor was working on the form. “What is it like?” “Usual stuff” she said. “I am filling up the columns as required. They want to know if we have various things, and the answer is affirmative for most of the questions.” Most? Not all? “What do we not have?” “First of all, we are in a transit OT. All the rooms required do not exist.” “No problem” I said. “I will show them the architect’s drawings, which only he can read. I will point out various rooms on those charts, and I will bring a magnifying lens from home so that the medical council assessor can see them. Any other problem?” “They want to know if we have a viewing gallery in each OT.” Once there was a viewing gallery in the emergency surgical OT in our hospital. It ran all round the OT. There was a cute staircase leading to it. One could view the OT table and the people from there. Needless to say the operation could not be appreciated from that distance, since binoculars or telescopes were not provided. I recall some guys used to go up there and watch the pretty anesthetists to their hearts’ content. When they repaired the OT, they closed off the gallery and put a galse ceiling for air-conditioning purpose. Now we are in the same OT using it as transit OT. But we cannot show that viewing gallery to the medical council assessors and claim to have fulfilled that requirement. “We have to state we do not have viewing galleries” I said. “If they ask me the reason, I will tell them the hospital is in a heritage building, and it is not possible to change the structure in any way, or we would have built viewing galleries in all OTs.” That was the truth, at least partly. The architect who called himself a consultant had pulled down existing toilets, so that the OT personnel would have to wait till they went home to visit a loo, or use the corridors like the cats and dogs did. That consultant would have a fit (serve him right) if he was asked to build viewing galleries within OTs. The part of my statement that was not true was that we would not have built such galleries even if it was possible. In modern times, one watches an operation on a closed circuit TV, not from a viewing gallery as if watching an opera.