Who should adopt robotic surgery, and when?

The ethical landscape of robot-assisted surgery: a systematic review

Robot-assisted surgery has been widely adopted in recent years. However, compared to other health technologies operating in close proximity to patients in a vulnerable state, ethical issues of robot-assisted surgery have received less attention. Against the background of increasing automation that is expected to raise new ethical issues, this systematic review aims to map the state of the ethical debate in this field. A protocol was registered in the international prospective register of systematic reviews (PROSPERO CRD42023397951). Medline via PubMed, EMBASE, CINHAL, Philosophers' Index, IEEE Xplorer, Web of Science (Core Collection), Scopus and Google Scholar were searched in January 2023. Screening, extraction, and analysis were conducted independently by two authors. A qualitative narrative synthesis was performed. Out of 1723 records, 66 records were included in the final dataset. Seven major strands of the ethical debate emerged during the analysis. These include questions of harms and benefits, responsibility and control, professional-patient relationship, ethical issues in surgical training and learning, justice, translational questions, and economic considerations. The identified themes testify to a broad range of different ethical issues requiring careful deliberation and integration into the surgical ethos. Looking forward, we argue that a different perspective in addressing robotic surgical devices might be helpful to consider upcoming challenges of automation.

Robotic assisted surgery in the United Arab Emirates: healthcare experts' perceptions

The adoption of Robotic Assisted Surgery (RAS) has grown around the world. This is also the case in the Middle East and Gulf region and specifically to the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The perception of RAS has been studied in the USA, Europe, and Canada. However, there is limited research on the perception of RAS in the UAE. The study aims to examine the perception of RAS among healthcare experts in the UAE and potential challenges. This qualitative study is based on interviewing healthcare experts in the UAE. Most of the study participants were clinicians and surgeons. In the UAE, RAS is adopted in general surgery, urology, brain surgery, and obstetrics and gynecology. Our findings show that healthcare experts have positive perceptions of RAS. The cost and lack of RAS training program are considered as challenges to adopting RAS in healthcare practices. More research is encouraged to examine perception variations with surgical practices in the UAE, Gulf and the Middle East.