Comanche County Memorial Hospital is celebrating 3,000 surgeries with the Da Vinci Robot. The robot is used by general surgery and Obstetrics & Gynecology at CCMH for a number of different procedures. Dr. Michael Sawyer, a General Surgeon at CCMH, said most abdominal surgeries can be done with it.
“I think it’s a great move forward,” he said. “Especially for people who need to have abdominal surgery operations. It can help them recover faster, and it can be done much more precisely, and I think we do get better overall outcomes with it.”
Jennifer Edwards, director of surgical services, said sometimes people think the robot is the one performing the surgery, but it’s just an assist to the doctors who are guiding the robot and telling it what to do.
“Where surgeons might be limited where they’re working at in a belly or something like that, a robot has no limitations and has a full 360-degree articulation and can get to places that previously we wouldn’t have been able to do those procedures laparoscopically,” Edwards said. “So it allows surgeons to do very complex cases in a minimally invasive atmosphere.”
“I started doing minimally invasive surgery with the laparoscope now 35 years ago,” Dr. Sawyer said. “That was a good advancement over open surgery, but now this is like light years ahead because the precision with which you can do things and the dexterity and the upgrade in vision is really pretty amazing. I think it allows us to do just about anything that can be done that way.”
The cutting-edge technology they’ve been using since 2018 is getting CCMH recognition across the state for how well it’s run.
“We were able to partner with the University of Oklahoma and their third-year general surgeon residency program now,” Edwards said. “So they come here, and they come here to train on our robot and with our robot team and our group of surgeons and so to have that when they could go anywhere else but to know they want to come here, that’s kind of a big deal.”
Dr. Connor Wilkinson, a General Surgeon at CCMH, trained on the robot while he was a student at OU and then came to work at the hospital after graduating.
“It helps me because it’s a really good camera, it’s 3D, it’s a wristed instrument, it’s also ergonomics, so it allows me to do the operation safely, efficiently, and allows me to treat more patients for a longer period of time because of the ergonomics,” Wilkinson said.
This isn’t the only robot they have. The hospital also has the Mako robot for hips, knees, and shoulders, and the Nuro robotics for spine and craniotomies.
“We do continue to expand our surgery portfolio,” Edwards said. “Every year our surgeons are going to additional training, and they’re able to add new procedures, and we are growing and expanding – which is wonderful. Those are patients that we used to have to send out to. We’d have to send those patients to Oklahoma City, and now we’re keeping them here.”
Edwards said they’re looking at purchasing another Da Vinci Robot in the future because of how often it’s needed.
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