Robotic surgery in Canadian law

Abstract

Robotic surgery fits within the general framework of Canadian medical law regarding such issues as patients' consent and suitability of medical equipment. Its two distinctive features are its relative novelty, and practice by practitioners in one jurisdiction on patients in another. Novelty raises issues of how courts determine legally-set standards of performance. Practitioners are held to the standards of their peers, but when a new technique is pioneered, there are no established standards of performance. However, the standard of disclosure of a technique's novelty and/or a practitioner's unfamiliarity with it exists, since this is not peculiar to robotic surgery. Cross-jurisdictional surgery raises licensure issues of where the surgeon is practising medicine, relevant fee schedules where they differ between jurisdictions, whether dissatisfied patients can sue in the surgeons' jurisdiction, their own, or either, and whether a court applies its own laws or those of an alternative jurisdiction.