MAKING SURGERY THEIR LEGACY
T
he lives of tens of thousands of people throughout the UK are saved and transformed daily by surgery. Almost 5 million surgical patients are admitted to hospital every year in England alone so choosing to leave the Royal College of Surgeons of England a legacy in your will can have a direct impact on the future of surgery and the patients it saves. A recent legacy has allowed us to fund multiple one-year research fellowships all costing in the region of ÂŁ65,000. One of the recent fellowships awarded with this generous bequest was to a trauma & orthopaedic surgeon whose project is looking at using augmented-reality gaming to optimise surgical performance. Delivering expert levels of surgery is a team skill, combining knowledge, technical and non-technical ability. Yet better understanding is needed about
how, together, the surgeon, their assistant and the scrub nurse acquire and integrate these skills. The developed Augmented Reality (AR) headsets allow multiple wearers to overlap 3D digital information onto the real world, tracking hands and surgical instruments. Using AR gamification, the project investigates how surgical teams learn, and if enhancing their abilities during simulated and real surgery can accelerate learning, deliver expert-level skill, and thus improve patient care. Another legacy gift supported a oneyear research fellowship of a urology surgeon whose project is looking at determining the genetic drivers of bladder cancer. Bladder cancer affects approximately 10,000 people each year in the UK. It is more common in older adults and men with one of Legacy Yearbook 2021 page 11
the most common symptoms being blood in the urine. This research aims to help sufferers of bladder cancer by looking into the genes, which play an important role in driving the cancers and their responses to treatments. In the short term, the project hopes to discover new ways to diagnose bladder cancer and predict patients’ responses to treatments and in the longer term, will aim to identify treatments that are more effective. The excellent fellowship applications we receive has doubled since the scheme was introduced in 1993 and we are unable to support 80% of applicants. We are always in need of more funding to enable projects that address the health challenges of modern society, supporting the development of pioneering ideas across the NHS. With each small success we take another step towards the next big breakthrough.
