Paediatric surgery

Abstract

As a surgical SHO, you are unlikely to have your own children. You will therefore find it very difficult to appreciate the enormous stress felt by otherwise rational parents when their child is ill or needs an operation, however minor. It is not until your own child is ill that you can really empathize with parents. Every parent of a child in hospital is, by definition, anxious and worried and this anxiety may present in several different ways; the parents may be aggressive, dazed or tearful (especially immediately post-partum) and will almost certainly not take in all you say first time.