Hillingdon Hospital operating theatres celebrate 500th robotic surgery
Surgery teams at Hillingdon Hospital are celebrating a milestone event - 500 surgical procedures carried out using the Da Vinci operating theatre robot.
Surgery number 500 - a gall bladder removal - took place on Tuesday 27 January. Afterwards, the patient, 43-year-old Sanaa Shawahina from Ealing, said she was feeling good, with minimal pain and was looking forward to going home later the same day.
The surgery was performed by Mr Yasser Mohsen consultant colorectal surgeon at the Hillingdon Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which runs Hillingdon Hospital, in Pield Heath Road, Uxbridge, and Mount Vernon Hospital in Rickmansworth Road, Northwood.
He joined colleagues in the operating theatres department rest room shortly after the 500th surgery, for a small celebration of pizza and a specially decorated cake to mark the occasion.
The 500 cases completed at Hillingdon so far came from a number of surgical disciplines, and other milestones have been celebrated before now. For example, in November 2025, the robot was used for the 50th gynaecological procedure by consultant gynaecologist, Manish Maheshwari.
Since it began using the robot, the Trust has found that surgery patients usually go home more quickly after their procedure, with better pain scores and reporting faster recovery later because of the minimally invasive nature of the keyhole surgery. The process in theatre is also better, with no need to move or even touch the patient during surgery.
Instead, a surgeon, working at a remote console uses hand and foot controls and looks through a high-definition viewer see get close-up images relayed via the robot's camera, mounted on one of its arms. The robot itself mimics the surgeon's hand movements with great precision, with wrist-like joints, delicate response to the controls and a number of safeguards, so if, for example, the surgeon releases the controls the robot simply stops.
The Da Vinci robot and the opportunity it gives surgeons has proven to be a good 'recruiting sergeant' for the Trust. Speaking on a recent Trust podcast, Mr Mohsen said: "We have achieved significant progress in our surgical department at Hillingdon. When I started it was two of us doing bowel cancer work; now there is five of us (and) we've also appointed new emergency surgical consultants.
"The most advanced stage of bowel cancer surgery is using the Da Vinci robot, a remote operating set up that allows a lot of meticulous, accurate-performance surgery”
A fellow surgeon, Mr Alistair Myers, the Trust's Clinical Lead for Colorectal Cancer and Robotic Surgery, told the assembled theatres colleagues that although there had been a learning curve, and getting to 500 cases had taken more than two years, because of the rapidity of learning and good use of theatre time the next 500 procedures should be completed in the next six months. He thanked everyone involved and pointed out the team effort required to make best use of the resources available.
Mr Myers and Mr Mohsen came out of the party briefly to reflect on the progress made so far, along with their colleagues, gynaecological consultant surgeon, Manish Maheshwari; consultant colorectal surgeon Alistair Slesser; and Mohammed Al Ani, colorectal surgeon.
Mr Slesser featured in a BBC news report in 2025 after carrying out pioneering breast reconstruction surgery
This procedure will now be performed on another patient, in February 2026, this time using a robotic procedure.
Mr Slesser said: “It's been an amazing thing four our Trust, trying to innovate and providing the very best cancer surgery we can provide using the robot, so I'm just immensely proud of my team and my colleagues who have managed to achieve this.”
Mr Al Ani said: “The future is robotics, it's a big selling point for why I joined the team and it looks like we're only heading one way and that is up: more surgeries robotically, more consoles and the future's bright.”
We did it so we could do difficult cases more easily, get better patient outcomes, train better, and recruit and retain surgeons for the future, so I'm really, really pleased with this programme
Mr Myers said that reaching 500 cases after a little over two years since the robotic surgery programme began was a milestone worth celebrating and proved the programme had been worth setting up and the investment in the robot justified. He said: “We did it so we could do difficult cases more easily, get better patient outcomes, train better, and recruit and retain surgeons for the future, so I'm really, really pleased with this programme.”