On Wednesday 11th June, NHS England announced a grand plan to benefit millions of patients with cutting-edge robotic surgery as part of radical plans to cut waiting times. The ambition is that 90% of all keyhole operations will be delivered with robotic assistance within the next 10 years. There is also a vision that increasing numbers of emergency operations will be delivered with robots.
Sir Jim Mackey, NHS Chief Executive said: “The NHS has pledged to return to shorter elective waiting times by 2029 and we are using every tool at our disposal to ensure patients get the best possible treatment. Expanding the use of new and exciting tech such as robotic surgery will play a huge part in this”.
While this is a hugely ambitious goal, I feel it completely misunderstands the current challenges in our system and in particular, the huge numbers of benign procedures on the waiting list, the need for higher productivity, and the need of our Residents to train in these index procedures. Increasing the number of robots or robotic procedures is not going to help with this and many believe will only increase the waiting times as many of us are still on our learning curves for robotic procedures and therefore productivity is not going to be as high as it can be. We will be working with the Government to help them realise their goals, but also to stress the importance of training, and focusing High Volume Low Complexity cases for Residents to gain these important index procedures.
If you haven’t already responded to the UK Surgical Workforce Census, please answer the short survey for the Royal College of Surgeons of England. It is important that we have good engagement with this to enable future planning of our workforce, understand current pressures and to allow us to contribute to the Governments’ long-term vision over the next 10 years.
Finally, as the weather seems to be taking a turn for the better, I want to wish you all a very happy weekend, and for those working, I hope you enjoy some downtime in the sun.
Mr Christian Macutkiewicz, President
