Welcome breakthrough

WITH good news as rare as hen’s teeth these days, it’s refreshing to read of a hi-tech breakthrough that brings hope to thousands of women.

It is also heartening that the enlightening story involves an arm of the much-criticised HSE.

It concerns baby Lucy O’Mahony, her mother Anne, a team of skilled surgeons and a €2 million robotic surgical system at Cork University Hospital. With the help of the da Vinci robot, surgeons carried out a complex procedure to prolong Anne’s pregnancy, thus ensuring little Lucy’s safe arrival safe and well yesterday.

Ever since the first successful heart transplant was carried out by Dr Christiaan Barnard in 1967, there has been dramatic progress in surgical medicine. As baby Lucy will testify, robot da Vinci, named after the Renaissance painter and inventor and using miniaturised tools and cameras to save her life, marks yet another welcome advance.