Scrub

I taught my students, who were going to the operating theatre with me last week, the scrub techniques. Rituals abound in the operating theatre, I confess, with all the meticulous and universally-agreed ways of washing our hands (or "surgical scrub"). The conventional ways of surgical scrub have been performed in countless times obsessively throughout our career life and with such conviction that they must be gospel. But are they?

I still remember my clumsiness (and that of my students, too) with the elbow operated taps during the very first time of going to the operating theatre. But then the Journal of Hospital Infection recently ran a story describing better types of taps in the theatre suites. The researchers showed that using leg operated rather than elbow operated taps for scrubbing could save 1400 tonnes of greenhouse gas emission a year. Think of it - it was only a matter of changing the water delivery system that resulted in at least a 50% cut in water use!

If there is any moral from this story, it would probably be the creativity for those of us who have been doing all the mundane jobs (such as scrubbing before an operation). As simple as it seems, the creativity to find a new way of doing a mundane job can be fun. For those of you who get used to two packets of sugar for the morning coffee, think of the way of tearing each packet and putting it one over another into your cup.

Have you ever thought of putting one packet of sugar over the other and opening both of them with just one single tear?