Robotic colorectal cancer operations at the University Hospitals of Northamptonshire (UHN) have been live streamed to support the education of surgeons.

Two local patients with colorectal cancer consented to support the event. They were operated on at Northampton General Hospital while their operations were live-streamed into the Cripps Education Centre, also at NGH on two dates in October.

The operations were part of a two-day robotic surgical symposium where consultants, colorectal surgeons, and senior doctors from Northamptonshire, the rest of the UK, and Norway and Portugal, met and took part in a range of events, lectures, discussions, and presentations.

This is the fourth time UHN have arranged an event as a way of teaching its own medical teams complex robotic surgery procedures while also enabling surgeons from other areas to learn state-of-the-art surgical procedures.

Mr Jamil Ahmed, UHN’s Deputy Director of Medical Education, who is also a consultant colorectal surgeon and lead for robotic colorectal surgery organised the event. He said: “Once again we were extremely grateful to two of our cancer patients for consenting to have their robotic operations streamed live into the surgical symposium in a totally anonymous way through close-ups of their surgery.

“This is the fourth time that we have delivered a robotic symposium at NGH and we have had great feedback on all of them.

“It a very powerful experience to watch robotic surgery in real time and means delegates can see every step of the procedure, through the eyes of the surgeon, and see where decisions are made, and why they are made, and take part in discussions.

“The procedures we undertook in the live-stream we have performed many times with great success but surgeons have their own ways of doing things and it is a great opportunity to see exactly how others may perform the same operations you yourself do.”