London hospital cuts waiting lists with innovative system | Hacker News Reader

London hospital cuts waiting lists with innovative system

thetimes.co.uk

This works great when you have an excellent surgeon and surgeries that are unlikely to entail surprises (which seems to be how they are applying it).

This approach probably doesn't scale for surgeries that inherently have more contingencies. You really shouldn't be anesthetizing patients that might not be operated on if the previous patient in the queue has complications.

Seems like the sub-heading is the real non-clickbait summary of the story: "Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospital has slashed its elective backlog by running two operating theatres side by side"

TL;DR: they're running it more like a CPU pipeline, instead of the surgeon "idling" while the patient is being anaesthetized, they start anaesthetics with patient n+1 while patient n is being operated on.

I wonder if the next step is to have the surgeons and doctors in a central control room doing the surgery by robotic arm and VR headsets. This removes the time for surgeons to dress up and get clean.

Actual time spent scrubbing and gowning up is minimal, and you have to do approach and closure physically on the patient (not on the robot console). In a training institution, these can often be handled by trainees, but the lead surgeon will want to take a bigger role in placement of the ports used to introduce instruments.

The ability to physically see instruments, supplies, etc., is often important. So you'd have to have some setup that allows injecting other images into the surgeon's feed from the robot.

This is pretty everyday stuff for an efficient surgeon doing certain kinds of surgeries (i.e., ones whose duration is relatively short and predictable), so I'm not sure why this is being reported on as though it's new. Maybe there's even more standardization of technique?

https://archive.ph/xud3e

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