Patients' Safety Comes First
¡@¡@Starting from July 2004, this new training programme, the first of its kind in Hong Kong, will be introduced to all surgical trainees as well as seasoned surgeons across different surgical disciplines in the New Territories East Cluster (NTEC) including the Prince of Wales Hospital, the major teaching hospital of the Faculty of Medicine of CUHK. ¡@¡@Instead of continuing the conventional "see one, do one, teach one" apprenticeship model, all basic surgical trainees in NTEC will need to undergo virtual reality training which fosters practice and development of laparoscopic techniques under different computer simulated scenarios before operating on a real patient. ¡@¡@"Hong Kong is in urgent need of dedicated laboratory-setting training facilities for repetitive training and practices of skills in different simulated scenarios with no risk to patients. After all, patients' care is our utmost concern, and we are committed to making the most out of leading edge technology to enhance patients' care," said Professor Andrew van Hasselt, Chairman of the Department of Surgery of CUHK. ¡@¡@The evolution of Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS), popularly known as "keyhole surgery", has brought drastic changes to the approach to and practice of all surgical disciplines since the 1980s'. While the advent of MIS hugely reduces the trauma of surgery and pain suffered by patients and enables faster recovery significantly lowering the cost of surgical procedures and aftercare, it at the same time challenges traditional apprenticeship methods of surgery training. ¡@¡@"MIS has been widely applied to operations of the abdomen, chest, head and neck, brain and vascular system. It has also been proven both safe and effective in children and even newborn infants. We expect the popularity, complexity and importance of MIS will continue to increase in the future. And the necessity for having virtual reality training is becoming more pressing," added Professor Yeung Chung Kwong, Chief of Paediatric Surgery, CUHK and a pioneer in MIS surgery. ¡@¡@Unlike conventional open surgery, where operative manoeuvres are predominantly intuitive, surgeons practicing MIS have to operate and assess organ structures on a television monitor with its flat two-dimensional image rather than relying on direct vision and the important sensation of touch. Not only are movements restricted by the keyhole access, they also become paradoxical in nature since the normal direct coupling of hand and eye no longer applies. ¡@¡@Adequate training in such surgical skills must therefore ideally take place in a man-made simulated environment, similar to the way airplane pilots acquire their skills in an airplane simulator, before live surgery on patients can confidently be performed. The laboratory allows safer, efficient and repetitive training and practice in the whole range of MIS skills and procedures in a cost-effective manner. Virtual reality training allows objective assessment of operation quality, standardisation of operation procedures and pre-operational planning. It also affords call-up of different simulations and scenarios in a highly cost-effective manner. Most important of all, surgeons no longer need to test dangerous or new surgical procedures on patients themselves but in a safe, controlled environment instead. ¡@¡@"Being a leader in many aspects of MIS in Asia, and some in the world, CUHK is obliged to lead Hong Kong and Asia to master and further develop MIS, an extremely advanced technique which is destined to be fundamental to the very future of surgery. The introduction of this virtual reality programme will certainly enhance MIS training in both our next-generation surgeons and practicing ones," said Professor Sydney Chung, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, CUHK who performed the first laparoscopic cholecystectomy in Hong Kong as early as 1990. ¡@¡@The Faculty of Medicine of the CUHK has been playing a pivotal role in MIS development and research in the Asia Pacific region. Over the years, members from different divisions have developed a great number of novel MIS techniques; many world's and Asia's firsts have been performed in Prince of Wales Hospital. With strong clinical strength and collaborative research effort, the Faculty of Medicine is working closely together with the Department of Computer Engineering of CUHK to strengthen the research and development in the field of computer-assisted surgery in Hong Kong.
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