Robot-assisted surgery is launched at Mater Private

A NEW programme to be launched today at the Mater Private Hospital in Dublin will offer robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgery for a range of procedures.

The programme, which is to include urology, gynaecology and colorectal surgery, will use a da Vinci robot system to assist the surgeon in carrying out complex procedures through keyhole surgery.

About 40 patients have already undergone urological procedures at the Mater Private using the €2 million robot system.

“The type of work that we are doing by robot-assisted keyhole surgery is almost beyond the scope of doing it purely laparoscopically,” said Mr Kiaran O’Malley, a consultant urological surgeon at the Mater.

“It facilitates the surgeon to perform hand movements and suturing techniques and dissection that aren’t possible laparoscopically, and which would otherwise have to be performed by conventional open surgery.”

To prepare for the procedure, the surgeon scrubs up and puts the instruments in place, and the robot is “docked” or attached to them.

An assistant then remains beside the patient while the surgeon goes to a nearby console and looks down eyepieces into a three-dimensional visualisation field while operating the controls, explained Mr O’Malley.

He noted that in general, patients undergoing minimally invasive surgery tend to have shorter hospital stays and recovery times than those undergoing open surgery.

“It’s a much easier procedure for the patient to recover from: they are back to playing golf in three or four weeks rather than perhaps four months,” he said.

Training to use the robot involves working through a range of drylab, wetlab and mentoring phases. Eventually the surgeon can operate independently, and then move on to more complex procedures, said Mr O’Malley.

Hospitals in Galway and Cork also use the da Vinci surgical robot, but the Mater Private Hospital will now start to use it across a wider range of specialties.