New surgical robot urgently needed

Help patients with cancer of the pancreas, liver, gall bladder and bowel be treated much faster

We’re asking for your support to help us raise £2.2 million to buy a new surgical robot for the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust.

Support us to buy a new surgical robot

As one of the country’s largest cancer treatment centres we have just one surgical robot, which is used to maximum capacity in the kidney cancer department. Our Da Vinci Xi robot performs around 450 surgeries per year and is one of the busiest surgical robots in Europe right now.

Read video transcript

Text on screen:

Revolutionising treatment for people with cancer

Ravi Barod, Consultant urological surgeon and robotic surgery programme lead

Interview:

We’ve had a very successful robotic program that’s been running for ten years now at the Royal Free. And over those ten years, we’ve gone from a hospital that performs very little robotic surgery to one of the highest volume kidney cancer centres in Europe.

Training sequence:

If you could just come here, Mark, bring in your sucker, and then you’re going to put the tip of it there, and you’re going to take the sucker down to eight o’clock, like that. Beautiful. And that’s enough. No more than that. There we go. That looks nice there doesn’t it? Yeah.

Ravi Barod, Consultant urological surgeon and robotic surgery programme lead

Interview:

About 92% of the operations that we now perform are performed using the surgical robot. Patients lose less blood during their operation. They’re in less pain after their operation, and they get back to their normal lives a lot quicker. It’s a real game changer for a lot of complex surgery.

The incision is just the width of your little finger, about eight millimetres in size. We put a camera in one incision and we put instruments in the other three, and whatever movements that are made in my hand get copied by the instruments that will be docked in the robot. But the robotic instruments, they have 720 degrees of movement, which really means that there’s some things that we can do that we just couldn’t do with open surgery.

Training sequence:

Thank you. Keep going, keep going. Very good.

Ravi Barod, Consultant urological surgeon and robotic surgery programme lead

Interview:

One of the patients who really experienced the benefit from robotic surgery was one of the first patients that we offered removal of the kidney or nephrectomy to as a day case.

This was a young patient who had a tumour in their kidney. And we were able to offer him an operation where he came in at eight o’clock in the morning, had his surgery, he was recovered and was discharged by seven pm that evening. And this has really revolutionised the concepts associated with major cancer surgery. And this is something that every patient would wantand what we would want to give to all of our patients.

At the Royal Free Hospital, we are a complex surgical hub, and we accept patients from all over the country, and that demand is only increasing.

We use this robot probably about six days a week, and another speciality will use it another day of the week, but there just is not enough capacity anymore for us to expand this technology to other specialities because clearly they need time and training on the robot in order to start their programs.

Professor Joerg-Matthias Pollok, Consultant hepato-pancreato-biliary (HBP) surgeon

Interview:

In the moment, we don’t have access to the robot for complex HPB (liver, pancreas, gall bladder, bile ducts) surgery. But, we would see that this could have huge impact on the patients in our service.

Angeline Shoniwa, Operating theatres senior nurse

Interview:

The training that is involved in it is exciting. And it’s an incentive as well, for us to keep staff because there is the future of surgery. So everyone will want to come and work with us.

Ravi Barod, Consultant urological surgeon and robotic surgery programme lead

Interview:

With the new robot, they will be able to develop minimally invasive ways of doing those operations, which, means that their recovery will be quicker. And if they are in and out of hospital quicker, then more patients can be operated on.

Professor Joerg-Matthias Pollok, Consultant hepato-pancreato-biliary (HBP) surgeon

Interview:

We have the chance to not only develop HPB cancer surgery with the robot in our local hospital, but beyond, develop this for the nation and for the world to provide better service for patients in the future.

Angeline Shoniwa, Operating theatres senior nurse

Interview:

So if you are thinking of donating, we’ll be really grateful. Thank you very much.

Text on screen:

The future of robotic surgery is here.
Your support is vital to enable us to purchase this cutting-edge technology for cancer patients at the Royal Free.
Contact Russell Delew, Director of Fundraising and Campaigns: [email protected].
Charity number: 1165672.

We now need to bring in another robot so that our world leading cancer surgeons can expand this cutting-edge technology to other specialties. Robotic surgery means:

smaller incisions – just 1cm long, about the width of your little finger
less blood loss during surgery
less pain after surgery
faster recovery
lower readmission rate
more complex procedures are now possible

And the faster recovery time for our patients will allow us to perform more life-saving operations on almost double the number of people.

We have launched a major campaign to fund the purchase of a second surgical robot for use with cancers of the pancreas, liver, gall bladder and bile ducts. These cancers are some of the most aggressive forms of the disease, so early surgical intervention is essential for our patients.

Having an extra robot will mean we can treat around twice as many patients as we can today. And with the Royal Free London receiving around 50,000 cancer referrals per year, that’s going to make a big impact.

The whole robot surgery has been so amazing. Mr Patki talked me through the surgery so I was fully aware of what was going to happen. It was so cool he operated on me with a robot and I’m very grateful there’s minimal scarring. I feel like I’ve got my life back again.

Megan, 26, who had complex kidney surgery performed by Prasad Patki using the surgical robot.

We need to raise £2.2 million to fund the surgical robot and we need your help to make this happen. Please support our campaign in any way you can and feel free to get in touch to discuss how you can help. Contact [email protected].

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