Surgeons for a Day

Many departments observe Take Your Child to Work Day, but none do it up quite like the Department of Surgery. Here are scenes from last year’s event.

On April 27, kids will be VIPs at the Department of Surgery’s sixth annual “Take Your Child to Work Day.” Surgeon in Chief Julie Freischlag will welcome about 100 children ages 6 to 13 to Mountcastle Auditorium. They will practice laparoscopic surgery by picking objects from a box, and gown up on their way to a mock OR, where they will handle surgical instruments to extract diseased organs (cotton balls). Another group will bone up on patient safety.

After a pizza lunch, the budding surgeons will play a medical game. They’ll never complain about hand washing again after they see, under a UV light, all the germs that washing fails to remove. Others will investigate an ambulance, take a helipad tour, peek inside the Hopkins helicopter and catch a takeoff. They will go home with a photograph of themselves grinning in a lab coat.

Preparation for this extravaganza is immensely time-consuming but satisfying, says Diane Alejo, an IT manager in the Division of Cardiac Surgery, in charge of this year’s event. She is backed up by eight committee chairmen and 20 volunteers.

As real as the activities are, the kids will have no patient contact, nor will they visit a clinical area. Don’t you wish you were a kid?

—Lydia Levis Bloch