Surrey Hospital completes it's 10,000th robotic assisted surgical procedure

Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust has performed its landmark 10,000th robotic assisted surgical procedure.

The Trust first introduced robotic-assisted surgery in 2009 with the installation of its first da Vinci surgical system.

In 2009, the hospital performed 4 surgeries all year, however last year (2024) completed over 1,500 procedures.

Tim Pencavel is the Joint Chief of Service for surgery at the Royal Surrey County Hospital.

He says it's not just in quantity that robotic surgery has developed, it's also significantly grown in the range of procedures it can assist in

"We've also now expanded into a lot more specialties than we had, so while that first operation was for a gynaecological cancer, we now offer cancer surgery across seven different specialties as well as some benign surgery as well.

So the breadth of what we offered has certainly got greater and obviously technology improves year on year, doesn't it?"

Pencavel also explained to us how the robotic procedures actually work

"So the robot itself consists of a console which the surgeon sits in in the corner of theatres, which is connected to a effector robot that sits over the patients and control and has the instruments within it.

The surgeon has some hand pieces which he or she uses to control the robot and make very fine movements. The robot has scaling, so the movement is 10 times smaller for the robot than it was for the human hand that made it, and the view down the robot console is 3 dimensional view of the patient's anatomy

So it allows us effectively to position ourselves as if we're looking from the inside of the patient at the anatomy and do operations through smaller incisions."

Pencavel also told us about what he expects the future to hold for robotic assisted surgery

"We know the NHS 10 year plan has said that we'd like to move to a much greater proportion of robotic surgery.

I think as the technology refines itself and as we get better and better at using that technology, we should hopefully be able to broaden the net of people who can be offered robotics.

I think the days of autonomous robots are probably a fairly long way off, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing"

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