The Holy Grail of immersive technologies is equitable access.
This is according to Celia Riga, who leads the surgery department at London NHS England and serves as a consultant vascular surgeon and an honorary senior lecturer at Imperial College London.
To realise this, she advocates integrating immersive simulation into institutional governance and processes, and into accreditation as part of mandatory training.
For her, there remains a disconnect between cutting-edge technology in training and in practice, citing the perception of training as a separate entity from service delivery as a stumbling block.
The reality, she said, is that surgeons train to deliver the service, and that part of the quality process is to ensure ‘we have highly skilled, highly adaptable, highly diverse multidisciplinary teams, all trained to the same level and able to deliver high-quality care’.
Once that mindset is adopted, training and service become interchangeable, she suggests.
As well as a leader in surgical education, Celia is also a medtech innovator and was on an insightful panel discussion at The Surgeon Show recently that explored how immersive technologies are evolving beyond traditional simulation.
The session, chaired by Dr Rafael Grossmann, a renowned trauma surgeon and digital health pioneer who also delivered the keynote address at the exclusive surgical leaders’ summit, examined how virtual reality, holography, and avatars are expanding surgical training, collaboration, and decision-making.
Afterwards, The Surgeon Show’s partners, Future Medicine, caught up with Celia to hear her thoughts on cutting-edge technology in training and practice.
The session was, she said, ‘a fascinating discussion on the role of VR and simulation in practice’ that ‘stimulated thought about where simulation is going over the next five years’.
Having worked with simulation and immersive technologies in surgery and interventional procedures for over 20 years – ranging from in vivo and cadaver models to digital simulators – she grew convinced of the value of team-based training. This approach offers a fully immersive experience in which the entire team, including surgeons, anaesthetists, nursing staff, and students, can go through a procedure from start to finish, complemented by structured pre- and post-briefs.
This, she said, was particularly relevant for new devices and techniques, or for cases that are high risk but low volume in practice.
Most of the panel, she noted, worked with diverse teams, though not necessarily the same people. She maintained that it is vital that those in the operating room have had similar experience of the surgeries they perform – the choreography of surgery, as Dr Rafael J Grossmann coined it.
She argued that team-based training means familiarity with the procedure and the technology used, but, more importantly, it enables staff to anticipate challenging aspects of the procedure, such as complex anatomy and potential complications.
Celia welcomed The Surgeon Show’s innovative approach to sharing experiences from around the world, noting how well the sessions were structured across different technologies and audiences, and how they apply to various members of healthcare teams – from marketing, research and development, and healthcare delivery perspectives.
She added that there is much to be said about policy and implementation, as these are ‘probably among the biggest barriers to these technologies becoming widely available and accessible’.
Successfully attracting an impressive 656 C-suite surgeons from around the world,
the UK’s pioneering Surgical Leaders Summit has already cemented its place on the global surgical calendar, with next year’s event already planned for London.
The UK’s Exclusive Surgical Leaders Summit takes place at the Business Design Centre in London, Friday 19 February 2027.
For more details, click here.
