Da Vinci Robot surgery
To help patients recover quickly and reduce the length of their stay in hospital after surgery, the Freeman Hospital has acquired a Da Vinci ‘robot’ to carry out certain operations.
The first machine of its kind in the North East, the robot enables surgeons to carry out complex operations with extreme precision.
Range of uses
Currently, we use the Da Vinci robot for treating men with prostate cancer in an operation called ‘Robotic Prostatectomy’. Soon, the robot will be used to treat patients who have kidney and bladder cancer.
We expect that within the next year, we will start using Da Vinci for treating patients with throat cancer, and also for cardiac surgery.
Benefits for patients
Using the robot for surgery has a range of benefits for patients including:
- Smaller incisions on the body
- Less pain
- Shorter hospital stay
- Faster recovery.
More precise surgery helps to avoid damage to structures around the surgical area. This helps reduce complications and side effects from surgery – in prostate surgery, this can include urinary incontinence and sexual dysfunction.
Precision control
The Da Vinci robot uses tiny instruments, which have an even greater range of motion than the human hand. The machine can filter out any unsteadiness in the surgeon’s hand and makes their movements more precise.
It also magnifies the surgery area up to ten times. This helps the surgeon to see healthy tissue, blood vessels and the problem areas much more clearly.
Videos
You can see one of our surgeons, Naeem Soomro talking about the treatment on BBC Television.
There’s also more information and a video about patient experiences of the Da Vinci robot.
