Mr Sri Kadirkamanathan, consultant upper GI surgeon at Mid Essex Hospital Services NHS Trust, has carried out his first operations using the new “intuitive” surgical robot, the da Vinci Xi.
The patients were two women in their 20s who suffer from gastroparesis. This condition led to them being unable to eat normally and vomiting on a daily basis. Both had lost a significant amount of weight and were experiencing difficulties with continuing their university education as a result. They underwent an operation to insert gastric pacemakers, involving intricate suturing of electrodes into the stomach.
Mr Kadirkamanathan said: “The robot made it so much easier to perform the procedure. The robotic part of the procedure only took 30 minutes. The surgery was done through three, eight millimetre cuts. Both of the patients went home the next day.
“The use of the robot was very intuitive. It was very comfortable for the surgeon, easy to use, very precise surgery and a very good short-term outcome for the patients. I believe that robotic surgery will be the way that operations are carried out in the future.”
‘Our Charity’ is calling on the community to rally together for our £1.5million appeal to fund the upgrading of the robotic surgery service at Broomfield Hospital, including a state-of-the-art new surgical robot and the continued use of surgical robotics.
There is significant evidence that demonstrates a number of advantages for patients who have benefited from surgery with the surgical robot compared to conventional surgical techniques including:
- 0% perforation rate for Heller’s Myotomy (compared to 12% rate – European trial)
- Shorter hospital stays
- Immediate effects within recovery
- Precision surgery (overcoming limitations of laparoscopic surgery)
- Articulation beyond normal manipulation
- Naturally occurring tremors filtered out by computer software
