Robots in the NHS

Did you know that there are robots already working in the NHS?  This is pretty cool when you think about it.  It means that there are some things that robots can take over very (usually) very tired and overworked medical staff.  The one that I have been looking at is called the “Da Vinci Robot”.  It allow for a robot to do minimal invasion of the body but still do complex tasks.  The ethics of this are irrelevant for this post, but what people have found out about it are not.  

Mr Gillies has done a lot of the groundwork on this one.  If you look at his list of request he has asked two questions which are pretty much what we all want to know:

Please provide a document which explains:

- how many da Vinci robots are owned by the Trust

- the number and type of procedures performed with the assistance of the da Vinci robot in the most recent financial year.

From Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust they answered that they owned one which did 247 operations on the prostate. Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust answered that they owned one but that it had done 92 procedures. The fact that we can find out this information, again, make the FoI quite exciting.  We can find out how many operations a robot can do on us!  The Newcastle Upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has two of these robots, by the way.

Some of you are probably thinking why do we need this?  I mean humans can do a lot of this work for us. Well when the question for the business reason for owning a Da Vinci robot was asked to Barts Health NHS Trust, they couldn't answer the question… because they didn't own one.

This doesn't mean, however that we cannot find this out ourselves. So I sent Newcastle Upon Tyne NHS Foundation Trust a request asking them  for the cost\benefit analysis of their machines.  Wouldn't it be fun to find this out?

Some of you might be asking, aren't we thinking of doing this here in Wales?  Well, this is something that I am going to touch on again.  The thing is, I want to ask them all now, but I have sent them a number of requests lately and I want to give them all a bit of a break.  At time of writing, they still have yet to get to me on the matter of the building fully.

The thing that we can pull away from this, however, is that there are robots doing surgery in the UK and that these things are happening now!  Isnt this amazing to know that we can find this out. Sudden though, what happens if they mess up?  What happens if they kill someone?  How would they investigate this?  These are posts for another day.