burning issue on "robotic surgery" by yi jing

During the roundtable discussion, there was an issue about whether robotic surgery should be carried out in Singapore. Regarding to this topic, the discussion group focused on three points which were safety, reliability and cost.
Firstly, the safety and reliability were the first doubts. As we know, during operation, there will be kinds of emergencies. The robot whether can efficiently and accurately handle these situations was questioned. In order to reduce the worry, engineers not only provided plenty of data to prove how successful the robotic surgery is in western countries; they also explain details as many as possible. For example, the robotic system will be inspected before and after every surgery; and a surgeon will stand by to control the robot using a computer, in case the system suddenly has problem, the surgeon could take over the rest of surgery. Although engineers and doctors have showed their profession as much as possible, the public still cannot completely accept this technology. In my opinion, the most difficult thing is not to improve the technology to further, but to let the public be confident in the robotic surgery.

Due to costly development, operation fee must be much higher than traditional surgery. The public whether can afford such high fee? Regarding to this, the discussion group provided solutions that government is able to support partial fee on this surgery, however, we need to ask it is feasible? If government agree to pay partial fee for the public, who need to pay those surgeries and engineers? Is government or hospital? We must understand government is not able to compensate everything for public. If hospital will pay for these salaries, that expense will be huge expensive to hospital. Then in order to balance the income and expense, the operation fee is bound to be added onto patient. Hence, the costly operation fee is realistic. Only solve this problem, the robotic surgery is able to be widely applied.

In conclusion, if Singapore decides to use robotic surgery, the first and the most important thing are to relieve fear and solve the financial problem for the public. only these two main problems are solved, there is possible to widely carry on this technology.