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Gender differences in understanding and acceptance of robot-assisted surgery

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journal contribution
posted on 2019-04-25, 13:22 authored by Hilary McDermottHilary McDermott, Nazmin Choudhory, Molly Lewin-Runacres, Ismail Aemn, E.L. Moss
Robot-assisted surgery has numerous patient benefits compared to open surgery including smaller incisions, lower risk of infection, less post-operative pain, shorter hospital stays and a quicker return to the workforce. As such, it has become the first-choice surgical modality for several surgical procedures with the most common being prostatectomy and hysterectomy. However, research has identified that the perceptions of robot-assisted surgery among surgical patients and medical staff often do not accurately reflect the real-world situation. This study aimed to understand male and female perceptions of robot-assisted surgery with the objective of identifying the factors that might inhibit or facilitate the acceptance of robotic surgery. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 25 men/women from diverse social/ethnic backgrounds. The interviews were transcribed and analysed using thematic analysis. The majority of female participants expressed concerns in relation to the safety and perception of new technology in surgery, whereas many male participants appeared to be unfazed by the notion of robotic surgery. There were clear differences in how males and females understood and conceptualised the robot-assisted surgical process. Whilst male participants tended to humanise the process, female participants saw it as de-humanising. There is still a discrepancy between the public perceptions of robotic surgery and the clinical reality perceived by healthcare professionals. The findings will educate medical staff and support the development of current informative techniques given to patients prior to surgery.

History

School

  • Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences

Published in

Journal of Robotic Surgery

Volume

14

Issue

1

Pages

227 - 232

Citation

MCDERMOTT, H. ... et al., 2019. Gender differences in understanding and acceptance of robot-assisted surgery. Journal of Robotic Surgery, 14 (1), pp.227-232.

Publisher

Springer Verlag © The Author(s)

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Acceptance date

2019-04-09

Publication date

2019-05-02

Notes

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

ISSN

1863-2483

eISSN

1863-2491

Language

  • en