Coming to a theatre near us: On 1 July, surgeons of Amsterdam’s Slotervaart hospital are going to perform a laparoscopic gastric bypass, a stomach operation that is done through small incisions, and project it live in the capital’s Pathé Tuschinski theatre. The operation is a big matinee from 8:30 to 11:30 and will be performed on someone who is obese and needs the operation to survive. According to the hospital, it is a ‘very difficult operation that is only performed by a few Dutch hospitals’.

The audience will be able to ask questions about the operation to a doctor in the room who will then ask the surgeons performing the surgery.

Tickets are free, scroll down here to Gastric Bypass to send an e-mail and score some tickets.

(Link: Depers.nl)

Jan H. thought he was playing the Silent Hill video game when he shut down the electricity at the Sophia hospital in Zwolle last Queen’s Day.

Last Tuesday a court found him not guilty, simply because he had no idea of the true consequences of his deeds. H. has volunteered to undergo treatment.

Telegraaf reports that the 35-year-old was suffering a psychosis when he stepped into the hospital’s basement. By pulling levers and switches, he thought he could win a tooth brush. The power was down for 45 minutes during which patients in the intensive care unit had to be respirated manually and lifts got stuck. No patients suffered any lasting consequences, according to RTV Oost.

Silent Hill is a survival horror game, a sub-genre of the action adventure.

Update 30-10: added a link to the verdict.

(Photo of the old building of the Sophia hospital (1884) by Wikimedia user Arminiuzz, some rights reserved.)

I just turned away from the lock-picking talk, as the tent was absolutely packed (me being 5 minutes late). I don’t know how many people fit in these convention tents, hundreds, perhaps thousands, but that is the amount of people that after tonight may know how to break every lock you own.

Earlier today I was at the talk with possibly the smallest amount of listeners of this 4-day exercise, you might even say the attendants resembled Cantor Dust. OK, lousy statistical jokes aside, this talk was by statistician Richard Gill of the University of Leiden and dealt with the Lucia de Berk case.

I had heard of the case before. In 2001, a nurse from The Hague was accused of having murdered dozens of patients, and the strange thing was that most of her guilt was determined by statistics: she had been near the victims at the time of their deaths, and although a direct link with the accused in the form of a confession or evidence could not be established, the court found that the statistical likelihood of her being near all these victims at the time of death was so minute, she must have done it.

At the time I thought this reasoning seemed silly, but I have learned early on in life never to argue with statisticians. So imagine my surprise: here was a statician who argued that the court’s reason had indeed been extremely silly, and that an innocent woman had gone to jail.

I won’t bore you with repeating the entire lecture: author Maarten ‘t Hart summarized Gill’s position excellently in this article from NRC (Dutch). Gill’s paper on how likely the chance is that a nurse was on active duty during all deaths concludes that one in nine nurses would have gone to jail (PDF).

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Two Dutch gynaecologists have published a report which shows that more babies die at night and on the weekend in Dutch hospitals compared with weekdays. At night, the mortality rate is nearly 25% higher, and 7% higher on the weekend.

The gynaecologists say it is due to the absence of gynaecologists. At night and on the weekend, deliveries are performed by assistants who are less likely to request the assistance of a fully qualified gynaecologist if there is not one around. This situation reportedly leads to the deaths of 35 to 40 babies a year.

The two gynaecologists write that the Dutch obstetric system is under pressure. Recently published EU figures show that infant mortality in the Netherlands is above the European average. The report’s authors also wonder whether the traditional Dutch emphasis on home deliveries is still acceptable.

Well, if you know you’re going to give birth at night on on a weekend, maybe you’d better do it at home after all, which is still where many Dutch women give birth. According to women I once met working for Access NL, an organisation that supports expats and the likes, one of the major cultural shocks between other Western cultures and the Dutch for many women is how pregnancies are monitored.

(Link: radionetherlands.nl)