Robotic surgery takeover
We’ve held our first robotic surgery ‘super week’ for joint replacements, completing 17 operations, a mix of hip and knee replacements, across five days.
In an average week we’d do around six robotic joint replacements, so from Monday 3 to Friday 7 August we almost tripled that, without holding sessions outside usual theatre hours.
The aim was to reduce our waiting lists, focusing on patients who had experienced long waits for surgery, some more than 40 weeks.
It was a busy week for trauma and orthopaedic surgeon Vikas Raje (picture above, centre, with colleagues in theatre), who has been with our Trust since 1995. He led 14 of the operations:
Robotic surgery is the way forward. It allows us to do complex operations with more precision, assisting with accurate alignment, and helps improve long-term outcomes for our patients. Most patients went home on the same day and quite a few were impressed we were able to do so many.
I enjoy these super weeks as you get a real sense of satisfaction from what we can achieve if we work together. We all have the same mentality: ‘let’s do it for our patients’. It’s only made possible thanks to the input from all supporting staff.
It took around six weeks of planning, during which Vikas worked closely with our Admissions team to identify and pre-assess patients, ensuring they were ready for surgery.
Roxy Dinka (pictured below, second left, with colleagues from our Admissions team), patient pathway manager, said:
To achieve as much as possible during the week, everything must be in place beforehand, especially as our regular surgical lists are also running at the same time. We need to ensure patients have the relevant tests and scans, we have the staff we need, and our ward colleagues are ready to support with recovery once patients are out of theatre.
A lot of the patients we spoke to were keen to have their operations, and excited to have them done robotically, especially as it can mean a quicker discharge home. This was our first week only using robotic surgery and we plan to do more later in the year.
We first introduced surgical robots to our Trauma and Orthopaedic department in 2021 and have carried out around 800 robotic joint replacement operations since then.