Tele-robotic surgery: Nigeria needs more medical feats

A ray of light has broken through Nigeria’s otherwise gloomy health sector. At a time when the country’s healthcare system is groaning under inadequate funding, manpower shortages and medical migration, a remarkable technological breakthrough has demonstrated what Nigerian medicine can achieve when expertise, technology and investment converge.

Nigeria must not allow the moment to pass.

Surgeons at Redeemer’s Health Village, Redemption City, Mowe, Ogun State, led by a professor of urology and transplant surgery, Obi Davies-Ekwenna, have remotely performed tele-robotic surgery on a patient in Abuja, about 500km away.

The procedure, which allows a surgeon to operate on a patient from another location through robotic technology and telecommunications, is a major step forward for Nigerian healthcare.

The RHV deserves commendation for facilitating what has been described as the first tele-robotic surgery in West Africa.

The operation was a right radical nephrectomy to remove a cancerous tumour affecting a kidney. It was carried out in collaboration with RoboMed Global Inc. and Nisa Premier Hospital, Abuja.

According to the Chief Executive Officer of RHV, Adedamola Dada, the surgical robot at the Abuja hospital was connected through the internet to the robotic control system at RHV. It was a minimally invasive procedure.

As Dada rightly observed, the tele-robotic procedure, alongside other robot-assisted surgeries performed by RHV, represents a significant breakthrough for Nigeria.

It is encouraging that RHV is not alone. Other private hospitals are also performing robotic surgeries in Nigeria, including procedures involving the prostate, kidney, bladder, fibroids, colorectal conditions and cancers.

These developments reinforce the point that Nigerian medical professionals are capable of operating at the frontier of global medicine when they have the facilities, technology and institutional support to do so.

Nigerian doctors have repeatedly demonstrated extraordinary competence in complex procedures, including the separation of conjoined twins. In May 2018, for instance, Auwal Abubakar led a team in a four-hour operation to separate four-month-old female conjoined twins at the Federal Medical Centre, Yola.

In October that year, another team of Nigerian doctors successfully performed conjoined-twin separation surgery at the University of Abuja Teaching Hospital, Gwagwalada.

Then, in November 2019, a 78-member Nigerian medical team at the National Hospital, Abuja, successfully separated twin sisters joined at the chest and abdomen after a 13-hour operation.

Nigerian medical expertise has also made an impact far beyond the country.

In 2016, Nigerian-born surgeon Oluyinka Olutoye and his co-surgeon, Darrell Cass, led a team of about 20 medical professionals at Texas Children’s Hospital, Houston, in an extraordinary operation. They temporarily removed an unborn baby, Lynlee Hope, from her mother’s uterus at 23 weeks to remove a life-threatening tumour before returning the foetus to the womb.

The baby was subsequently delivered healthy by Caesarean section at 36 weeks. Olutoye had obtained his medical degree from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, in 1988.

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But technological breakthroughs will mean little if they remain expensive islands of excellence in a healthcare system that the majority of Nigerians cannot afford to use.

Medical care is already prohibitively expensive for millions. Public hospitals are overcrowded, while the steady migration of doctors and other health professionals has further weakened the system. Rural communities are particularly vulnerable.

The Nigeria Medical Association estimates that more than 50,000 Nigerian-trained doctors currently practise outside the country, while the Nigerian Association of Resident Doctors has put Nigeria’s doctor-to-patient ratio at 1:9,083.

In contrast, the WHO has long highlighted Cuba’s exceptionally high doctor density, with roughly eight to nine doctors per 1,000 people. Whatever the wider debates surrounding Cuba’s health system, the country demonstrates that national healthcare outcomes depend not simply on wealth but also on policy priorities, investment and organisation.

Nigeria’s neglect carries an enormous economic cost. Many Nigerians who can afford it routinely seek treatment abroad. The Coordinating Minister of Health and Social Welfare, Muhammad Pate, has said the country loses about $2billion annually to medical tourism.

The answer is not to celebrate isolated medical breakthroughs while the broader health system continues to deteriorate. The challenge is to turn such breakthroughs into a sustained national capacity.

That requires money, research, infrastructure and, above all, political commitment.

It is difficult to reconcile the ambition of building a modern healthcare system with the reported allocation of only N36million to the Ministry of Health from the N218billion appropriated for its capital expenditure in 2025.

The Federal Government must therefore treat the RHV breakthrough as a challenge as much as a triumph.

It should support the training of more Nigerian surgeons and other medical personnel in robotic and other advanced surgical techniques. It should encourage partnerships between hospitals, universities, technology companies and international institutions. It should strengthen broadband and digital infrastructure to make remote medical interventions safer and more accessible.

Most importantly, the initiative must not become a one-off spectacle celebrated today and forgotten tomorrow.

Nigeria needs to build the ecosystem that allows such feats to become routine rather than exceptional.

More funding for medical research is essential. So is an environment capable of attracting and retaining the doctors, engineers, scientists and other professionals required to sustain advanced healthcare.

Nigeria does not lack medical talent. What it lacks is a health system sufficiently ambitious, funded and organised to fully deploy that talent.

The tele-robotic surgery is therefore a reminder of what Nigeria can achieve when innovation is matched by investment.