I am very glad that this thread exists because I want to share my own experience with the costs that come with robotic surgery. I am a director of surgery at a large inner city hospital with a very limited budget. While these machines are safer and do have merits, the training required on top of the already extensive training we provide to our surgeons is quite extreme. Not only are these machines time consuming, they are also very expensive; with the robot I installed costing around $2 million just to set up. While I do believe they are a great technology, the cost of time and money for the hospital is absurd.(Bakalar, 2021)(HealthManagement.org, 2018)
Below I have attached an image of the training protocol, I suppose it is fun to see the units in action
While this case is a rare one I would like to share my experience as someone who fell victim to a malfunctioning piece of equipment. My case was extremely rare with my own research showing that there was around a 0.6% chance of this malfunction occurring during my surgery, but it still happened. During my operation the robotic arm had some kind of issue involving one of the small instruments at the tip. It was not screwed in properly and ended up falling into my body cavity during the operation. The mistake resulted in a puncture of my stomach lining and I had to undergo emergency surgery. I luckily survived that horrible experience, but I want to share my experience so people know that these machines are useful, but they are still not perfect.(Alemzadeh, H., Raman, J., Leveson, N. G., Kalbarczyk, Z., & Iyer, R. K,2016)