The New Dimension of Surgery: Telesurgery and Surgical Nursing

Abstract

In the recent COVID-19 pandemic, it has been observed that surgical patients have turned more towards telemedicine applications to meet their health care needs due to the fact that they cannot apply to hospitals unless they are mandatory and even the majority of non-urgent medical activities, including elective surgeries, are paused. Telesurgery, one of the telehealth concepts in the provision of health services, has emerged as a promising application known as remote surgery, which provides remote surgical care to patients. Today, telesurgical interventions performed away from patients using surgical robots, virtual reality applications, advanced computer and network technologies have become a rising trend in the field of surgery. It is obvious that telesurgery applications, which aim to provide high quality remote surgery with worldwide expertise, have some obstacles due to the fact that it is a very new technology. However, despite the obstacles, it is witnessed that telesurgical interventions are being successfully applied day by day thanks to different application methods. It is predicted that telesurgery, which is expected to reach and serve more patients in the future, will be more widely applied and developed with its high-speed advanced network connection, lower cost rates and reaching all over the world, even to space and the depths of the sea. When we look at the nursing practices in telesurgery, which is a new application area in the field of surgery, it is stated that positive results have been achieved, but the number of studies is still insufficient. Depending on the telesurgery technology, which is expected to develop rapidly in the coming years, it is thought that there will be a rapid increase in the number of studies on telesurgery in the field of surgical nursing. Therefore, in this review, it was aimed to clarify telesurgical interventions, which have been started to be applied by surgeons as a new trend in recent years and which is a very new and highly developed application area for nurses, and to examine the surgical nursing interventions applied in this field.