World surgical first for trauma and orthopaedics
Our trauma and orthopaedic team at St George’s became the first in the world to use the new Stryker T2A femoral nail equipment earlier this month.
Femoral nail surgery is performed on patients who have broken their thigh bone and require a metal rod being inserted to fix the bone and aid the healing process.
The surgery followed collaborative working between St George’s consultants Mr Hugo Guthrie, Ms Caroline Hing and Mr Omar Sabri and Stryker, the company that produces surgical and clinical equipment, including user trials of the new equipment at Stryker’s manufacturing and research facility in Germany.
The new equipment has been designed to better match the human anatomy than previous models, to shorten the operation time, lower the risk of patients requiring further operations, to enable less traumatic minimally invasive surgery.
The team involved in the user trials and last week’s world first surgery included Mr Hugo Guthrie; Dr Pallavi Waikar, Consultant Anaesthetist; Michalis Kaminaris and John Dela Luna, Theatres Team Lead.
Mr Hugo Guthrie said: “It’s great to be part of a team that strives to be at the forefront of trauma research and implementation. Facilitating and testing improvements in equipment and instrumentation is one of the great benefits of having so much expertise in our major trauma centre.”
He added: “The new equipment arrived last week and as it happened, a patient required this particular surgery shortly after which meant that we were the first in the world to use the new technology.”
Notes to editors
For more information, please contact Pippa Harper, Media Manager, on philippa.harper@stgeorges.nhs.uk or 020 8266 6128.
