New Delhi: On Wednesday, Safdarjung Hospital achieved a new milestone by hosting the 100th live surgical webcast. The webcast was organised under the E-Health online programme by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India.
According to reports, it is a new Asian record, and maybe the first in the world. Over the course of four years, a single surgeon demonstrated 100 live robotic and 3-D lap operations internationally.
According to reports, the webcast on Wednesday was watched by 1791 urologists from 20 different countries, bringing the total number of urologists who have watched AIIMS’ worldwide webcasts to over 15,000.
In an interview with Medically Speaking, Prof (Dr)Anup Kumar ,HOD,Department of Urology ,Robotics and Renal Transplant, SJH and VMMC, said,
We don’t work for a record. But yes, it’s a record because it’s a single surgeon’s live surgery. We have a hundred webcasts to buy. It’s not only the issue and probably the whole word, which is the new record, because I’ve not come across any other series of this kind of webcast, and when we started this there were a lot of challenges, because you have to have a good setup for that kind of broadcast, and we are very thankful to our Ministry of Health and Family Welfare for providing us with that platform. They included us in that list of medical colleges. They asked us to go ahead and start doing this webcast, and once we got permission from the ministry, of course, I talked to my colleagues in India and across the world and told them this is what we were planning to do, and they all increased the speed. They said, yes, you can start this, you can do it and it will definitely benefit our youngsters and that’s how the journey started. When you do live shows with a lot of tensions in the minds of the whole team, not only the surgeon, but also the assistant team, an anesthesia team, because you have been doing it continuously for so many years. Now everybody’s doing it and touching wood, we never had any problems. All the patience did fine, the studies were successful and we have the full unedited videos of all those surgeries and they have been also uploaded on the website. So anybody can go, and you can see the videos unedited.
Dr Kumar said,
We should not be denied good training because, when I went to the United States for advanced robotics training, there were few training centre’s in the country. This was around eight years back and I spent two years there. I thought you’d have something here in India who had to go outside to be trained, and that’s how this is one step ahead. We are going to continue this, and of course, we’re going to start more remote training opportunities for youngsters.
Talking about the technological advancements in India in the field of robotic and 3D lap surgeries, Kumar said,
India is now leading the world in the field of technology. Whether we talk about Laparoscopy. We are the leading institute doing the most 3D laparoscopic surgery in the country. And also, the robotics we have started now, 2-3 years back. In India, surgeons are already appreciated all over the world because of their good hand-eye coordination. And everybody acknowledges that these technologies should be perpetuated into remote areas of the country. This kind of webcast went well, but now it should be repeated by some of my other colleagues so that others can also do it. I think this is a proud moment for the country, because now 20 different countries know that India is leading the world in this kind of technology.
