Valencian public health is about to make a giant leap into robot-assisted surgery with the purchase three Da Vinci robotic surgery teams that will be installed, one per province, in the General Hospital of Castellón, the General Hospital of Alicante Doctor Balmis and the La Fe hospital in Valencia.
Until now, this equipment had only been used in the General Hospital of Valencia where it was installed in 2017, and in several private hospitals such as IMED, Hospital La Salud or IVO.
The cost of the three robots is 9 million euros.
The equipment will see “a great advance” since the Da Vinci robot allows minimally invasive surgeries to be performed, which enables a better and faster recovery of the patient.
The Da Vinci robot can be used in surgical interventions in the specialties of Urology, Gynaecology, General Surgery and Traumatology that were normally already performed by keyhole surgery, without completely opening the patient and using only several small incisions and a camera to operate.
The improvements that Da Vinci represents is that the tools used for the operation are robotic and controlled remotely by the surgeon. This has the advantage of increased precision and a greater range of motion as the robotic arms can rotate and move in ways that the surgical team cannot in a traditional operation. The equipment could even allow a surgeon to perform operations “from a distance” by operating the robotic arm console from another location.
Other advantages of minimally invasive surgeries, in addition to the reduction of the complications of each operation, will see shorter stays in the hospital, allowing greater availability and efficient management of healthcare resources.
One such module will be purchased for a hospital in each province, but robotic surgery is already being used in Valencian public health. In May 2017 the first robot arrived in Valencia private healthcare with the purchase made by the IMED group. A few months later, the General Hospital of Valencia also began to offer this type of minimally invasive intervention thanks to a research project by its foundation.
Through their initiative, they acquired a robotic platform “on trial” for an initial period of six months. In November 2017, the General’s team performed the first intervention with the Da Vinci: prostate cancer. Two years later, and given the impact that robotic surgery had, the General Hospital of Valencia decided to acquire their own equipment, a Da Vinci dVX, the latest and most advanced of those on the market at the time.
Following the success of the Da Vinci equipment in the General Hospital, through its foundation and together with the University of Valencia, the first Chair in Robotic Surgery of the C. Valenciana was established in February 2021.
In addition to these new robotic surgery devices, last July the tender was published, amounting to 3.8 million euros, for three new mobile electron accelerators for the treatment of patients with breast cancer through the technique of intraoperative radiotherapy, which will be installed in the Clinical Hospital of Valencia, the General Hospital of Elche and in the General Hospital of Castellón
