A recent report from the Royal College of Surgeons has stated that NHS patients may be missing out on ground-breaking new procedures due to a failure to adopt new surgical techniques quickly into everyday clinical practice. The Clinical Services Journal reports.
The recent Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) report, entitled From innovation to adoption: Successfully spreading surgical innovation, looks at the factors that have helped and hindered the adoption of new surgical techniques in England. It is based on an examination of five mainstream surgical procedures and it examines how to best speed the uptake of surgical innovations in a practical way, eradicating delay to ensure that the benefits of surgical innovations are realised by patients as quickly as possible.
The report cites a lack of evidence of the benefits of a new innovation as being a barrier to faster adoption. This can make it harder to secure the funding necessary to develop surgical skills and establish the correct infrastructure to support wider use.
Sarah Crane, chief executive at Pelican Cancer Foundation agrees with this conclusion. Commenting on the issues surrounding adoption of total mesorecetal excision (TME), which was pioneered in the 1980s as a treatment for bowel cancer, involving the precise removal of the entire lining of the lower bowel, she said: “It took a long time to gather sufficient data to prove the case for TME. It can be ethically challenging for surgeons to participate in a randomised control trial if something seems to be a logical advance. With TME it took a long time for the data to be collected and for acceptance of the practice in England.”
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