Patients having robotic cancer surgery do no better than those undergoing conventional keyhole operations. Doctors have said that companies must either improve the technique or cut the cost because the NHS cannot afford to spend money for little benefit. The growth of robotic surgery has been largely driven by marketing in the US rather than clinical evidence, researchers say in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The NHS has 58 surgical robots, which cost more than £1 million each, adding about £1,000 to the cost of each operation. “Surgical technology just seems to creep its way in to clinical practice,” said David Jayne, of St James’s University Hospital in Leeds. “The big thing about robot surgery is it’s dramatically expensive. The NHS was forking
The use of robots in surgical procedures is on the rise, but they cost more and take longer to perform operations than their human counterparts, according to a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Despite this, in a study of 24,000 kidney removal surgeries in US hospitals, JAMA researchers found that robots were used in 39 operations in 2015, compared to 862 in 2003. Studies elsewhere have demonstrated that robots used in colon, gallbladder and uterus removal are also slower and increase hospital costs.