Robotic facility wins surgeons’ approval

Located close to the centre of Wolverhampton on a 24-hectare site, the New Cross Hospital is the largest acute healthcare facility run by the Royal Wolverhampton Hospitals NHS Trust. The facility is the Black Country’s largest teaching hospital and has 17 theatres, including a number for specialist disciplines, such as eye surgery and cardiothoracics. Prior to completion of the new twin operating theatres, pressure on surgical facilities had grown to the extent that additional capacity had become essential. In fact, between May 2010 and May 2011, the Trust’s caseload was up by 1,800 cases on the previous year. Consequently, in early 2010, a team headed by Marion Washer, the Trust’s directorate manager for critical care services, and her colleague, Ian Bowen, specialty lead for general, urology, and vascular theatres, was tasked with producing a formal business case for a new twin theatre suite and ancillary accommodation. “Over the past 4-5 years, pressure on our existing main theatres, some of which are at least 20 years old, had begun mounting, with a significant increase in demand for many surgical procedures,” said Ms Washer. The new facilities therefore needed to be completed and fully operational, as quickly as possible.

 Pressure for extra capacity

“When it was acknowledged that we had a major surgical capacity issue, we considered several options – including increasing the number of sessions our surgeons worked each day and introducing weekend working. However, the Trust decided that modularbuilt facilities provided the best solution,” said Ms Washer. “The new modular theatres and recovery bay would not only effectively augment our surgical capacity sufficiently to enable us to accommodate demand going forward, but would also allow us to begin using, and further developing, robotic-assisted laparoscopic surgery, which we know has significant benefits,” she continued. The installation was completed by modular construction specialist MTX in just 13 weeks (once the modules were delivered), which ensured that the Trust’s increasing case load demands could be quickly addressed. Significant interest from the hospital’s surgical team in the benefits to patients, in particular from prostate cancer specialist and urologist, Peter Cooke, initiated the drawing up of a business case that saw the Trust’s Board approve the purchase of Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci surgical robot for the larger of the two new theatres, “Theatre 2”.