Yale Children’s Hospital Opens State’s

First ‘No Fear’ Operating Room

NEW HAVEN — Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital (YNHCH) has opened the first minimally invasive operating room in Connecticut specifically designed for pediatric patients. The new surgical suite is designed to allow surgeons and nurses better control over many specialized instruments and simulation equipment.

The new monitors will also provide faster information retrieval, allowing doctors to perform more technically advanced procedures on younger and smaller children.

“Minimally invasive surgery has brought dramatic changes to the lives of children,” said Milissa McKee, MD, director of pediatric minimally invasive surgery at YNHCH. “Infants and children now leave the hospital with wounds that measure a fraction of an inch. Pain is minimized, complications are eliminated, and patients go home sooner and quickly get on with their lives.”

The new operating room is called OR1, and is used primarily for minimally invasive laparoscopic surgery. OR1 is designed to allow the surgeon to control up to 31 separate medical devices at the touch of a button, including cameras, operating room lighting, and video conferencing systems.

The system also allows the surgical team to quickly retrieve critical patient data such as CT or MR images at the touch of a button for instantaneous reference.

The retrieval system is easily accessed from either of two command centers located inside or outside the sterile field, and from the nurse’s workstation. The most efficient advantage OR1 has over traditional technology, however, is that it allows surgeons the option of instant communication anywhere in the world using the advanced telecommunications where program parameters, telephone numbers or emails can be preset and called up in a moment’s notice.

“Better surgical tools and techniques, based on groundbreaking research, are allowing pediatric surgeons to move rapidly toward using minimally invasive techniques on everything from routine gall bladder operations on school-age children and teenagers to rare, complicated, highly specialized operations on tiny premature babies the day they are born,” added Dr McKee.

According to Dr McKee, with nearly 1,500 surgical operations performed at YNHCH, more and more are now minimally invasive. YNHCH’s specialists in areas such as cardiology, urology, cardiac surgery, and orthopedics will be using the minimally invasive surgical center.