Robotic surgery pioneered in Fife

Fife Today

More than 500 patients in Fife have now been treated using pioneering robotic-assisted surgery, which is also enabling Fife patients with prostate cancer to receive surgery right here in the Kingdom.

Transcript

00:00 So the robot is a means of performing the middle of the face of surgery, so what most

00:05 people would call keyhole or laparoscopic surgery.

00:09 Just like your hands, the robot has got a wrist.

00:12 And the advantage of the robot, beyond the fact it's got a better camera and I can look

00:16 at things binocular, I use two eyes, the robot with the wrist can work around corners.

00:22 So it's a way to be able to better operate in tricky locations.

00:27 When I do the operating, you feel as if you're in a 3D environment and therefore you can

00:33 better relate the different organs to each other.

00:36 Plus the degree of magnification is higher, so you can see things in better detail.

00:42 You have different additional instruments and ways of operating this machine that you

00:48 didn't have just doing it via a static keyhole.

00:52 And the main difference I find is strategy, I have to plan much more how I'm using the

00:57 instruments and in what way, because I'm using four instruments at the same time whereas

01:01 before I was using two.

01:04 But it offers so many advantages that the initial learning curve is quickly superseded

01:10 by the advantages you have for the patient to be able to perform all these technically

01:14 difficult operations.

01:15 In general, there's not that much of a difference in terms of physiological stability, but afterwards

01:22 in terms of how quickly the patients recover, how quickly they start to eat, how quickly

01:27 they're up, sitting out of bed and their morphine requirements and their strong pain

01:31 culling requirements are much less.

01:33 Key benefits for patients are we don't have a lot of precise surgery, we have better views,

01:38 we can do more complicated surgeries, they've got less pain afterwards and they're less

01:43 time lost.

01:44 We are doing more complex patients, we're doing a wider array of pathologies and so

01:50 just as you would expect, the more you do something the better you get at it and then

01:54 the more complex stuff that you can do.

01:57 Patients are quicker able to do their normal activities and go back to work, plus the complications

02:02 we're seeing and the severity of the complications are much less as a result because they're

02:07 not as badly affected by the trauma of the initial operation.

02:12 Often it seems that surgery is all about the surgeon or the big machine, it's not, it's

02:19 about a team and that's at least half the attraction for me, that this is teamwork.

02:24 It wouldn't be so successful if it wasn't for the team, good anaesthetic team, good

02:29 theatre staff, good surgical staff.

02:32 My expertise is only as good as the rest of the team, that's a large part of what gets

02:37 the results with better looking body.

02:39 [music]

02:44 [Music]

02:46 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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