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RACS ASC 2025
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Robotic surgery credentialing across institutions: are we covering it?
Verbal Presentation
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Verbal Presentation

2:30 pm

04 May 2025

Meeting Room C4.5

RESEARCH PAPERS

Disciplines

General Surgery

Talk Description

Institution: Bendigo Health - Victoria, Australia

Robotic surgery is a quickly growing resource in surgery, with institutions required to create or update policies surrounding credentialing operating surgeons. Credentialing requirements have previously been shown to widely vary across institutions in a 2021 North American study (1) despite a large widely available 2008 consensus document on robotic surgery (2). We sourced robotic surgery credentialing policies from institutions with a robotic program in Victoria, Australia with a high response rate. Extraction of requirements, themes, and credentialing pathways was undertaken. There were common themes including basic qualification requirements, previous robotic experience, previous caseload, new robotic surgeon, and proctoring requirements. Despite common themes there was significant variability across institutions, including a lack of definition of basic requirements, significant variability in require caseloads, and poor definition of surgeon proctors. Finding this variability suggests that despite previous consensus documents robotic surgery is still a rapidly growing area that policy is unable to keep up with. Further research could further evaluate this effect across the country. Stakeholders could be involved in ensuring a homogenous policy across institutions ensuring best patient care while promoting the teaching and learning of robotic surgery moving forward. 1/ Huffman EM, Rosen SA, Levy JS, Martino MA, Stefanidis D. Are current credentialing requirements for robotic surgery adequate to ensure surgeon proficiency?. Surgical Endoscopy. 2021 May;35:2104-9. 2/ Herron DM, Marohn MJ, SAGES-MIRA Robotic Surgery Consensus Group. A consensus document on robotic surgery. Surgical endoscopy. 2008 Feb;22:313-25.
Presenters
Authors
Authors

Dr Frank Dunley - , Dr Jess Paynter - , A/Prof Janelle Brennan -