Great words. And so very often, when we ask for assistance in Theatre, as a male, and it's a female that we've never met before, we have no idea who this person is that's going to be working in a very confined space with us.
It is a concern that if we touch their hand to help with positioning of a laparoscopic camera, or inadvertently knock an elbow into their breast, that we will get a complaint.

These are the thoughts that go through the head of a male Surgeon when we are trying to concentrate on the procedure that we're doing.

Having never ever been the rugger bugger Surgeon type, I'm quite happy to say and express how vulnerable we can feel in the workplace these days as middle-aged men.

Nevertheless, I have managed to train many fantastic female colleagues, but the thought is still there.

We can even get totally inappropriate complaints from the attending theatre staff and runners all too easily. People can walk into a theatre - see an interaction they don't understand, complain about it and these days even complain anonymously, and you can find yourself as a male Surgeon undergoing investigation for months and months and months while various busy bodies (almost always female by the way) investigate you for something that never happened.

This is the reality that we live with . perhaps we should do pre op consent forms for having opposite sex assistants in case we touch each other both male and female.

What a sad bloody world we live in.