Sudbury’s hospital has launched a multi-million-dollar campaign to bring robotic-assisted surgery to northern Ontario. This week, Health Sciences North launched its ‘Surgical Evolution’ campaign to raise money for technology to allow for robotic-assisted surgery and a fixed imaging suite. The suite would provide care for patients battling cardiovascular disease, strokes and aneurysms. Dr. Jeff Yao, urologist at HSN, said robotic-assisted surgeries allow patients to recover faster. Better outcomes “For many cancer surgeries, whether that be urology, cancer surgeries, colorectal cancer surgeries, as well as thoracic cancer surgeries, as well as other minimally invasive surgeries, that allow us to kind of operate with more precision, with less invasion and better outcomes overall,” said Yao. HSN is currently the only academic health sciences centre of its size in Ontario without an advanced robotic-assisted surgery program for cancer care. Yao said surgeons operate the robotics during surgery. “What happens is you have a surgeon that controls the machine through a console, and then you have an assistant as well as a surgical scrub who will assist the machine to operate and then assist the surgeon that controls the machine,” he said. Every year, more than 150 patients must travel hundreds of kilometres south to Toronto, Ottawa or Hamilton just to receive robotic surgeries. Sudbury resident Mike Dudar was one of them. In 2024, he had to travel to southern Ontario for robotic-assisted surgery for prostate cancer. “It’s absolutely upsetting because your mind is twirling with the thoughts of how’s the surgery going to go? What’s going to happen afterwards?” Dudar said. “You’re thinking as you’re going down what happens if there’s an accident on Highway 69, and you have to go around; are you going to be late for appointments? All that goes through your mind and, really, people shouldn’t have to worry about stuff like that.” Faster recovery Dudar said the surgery went very well. “I ended up with a few small incisions along my abdomen,” he said. “I was in recovery. And then 90 minutes after the recovery, I was out walking in the hallway.” Now an advocate for the Surgical Evolution campaign, Dudar said he wants others to be able to stay closer to home. “Having gone through it and seeing how well it works and the amazing recovery afterwards, everyone should have access to this up here in Sudbury or in the northeast,” he said. Yao said the new technology would also improve recruitment and retention. “Most urologists that are trained during residency and fellowships are all robotically trained,” he said. “This will be vital to getting the best surgeons we can to come to Sudbury to HSN.” HSN is hoping to raise at least $10 million and estimates it will take several years. To kick off the campaign, local philanthropists Allain and Anita Labelle and family have pledged to match all community donations dollar-for-dollar up to $100,000 up to Nov. 6.
