In February 2022, the Surgical Innovation Theme of the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Bristol Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) held an interactive workshop in Bristol. We invited clinicians, healthcare researchers, and members of the public to reflect on past and ongoing research in the theme and discuss plans for future work.

Surgery is a common treatment for a range of different health problems. Because of this, most people will undergo surgery at some point in their lifetime. Innovation in surgery, such as the introduction of new procedures and surgical devices, is crucial to improving patients’ health. However, there is currently little guidance for how new surgical procedures and devices should be introduced safely and efficiently. There are also uncertainties about how best to study new procedures and devices to evaluate their potential risks and benefits. This means that patients may be offered new surgical procedures and devices for which the risks and benefits are not well understood.

Our goal in the NIHR Bristol BRC Surgical Innovation Theme is to understand and improve how new surgical procedures and devices are introduced into clinical practice and improve how early studies of these new procedures and devices are conducted.

During the meeting we heard from members of the research centre about how new surgical procedures are currently introduced and used in patients, issues to consider around the ethics and safety of introducing new procedures, and what information should be communicated to patients when they are undergoing a new procedure or receiving a new device. We also worked in groups to consider how we may best design research studies to evaluate new surgical procedures and devices.

The views of our public contributors were valuable to helping us understand the patient’s perspective of surgical research and inform our plans for future research.