The procedures performed with surgical robots in Catalonia have risen from 1,288 in 2018 to 9,402 in 2025, representing an increase of over 700% in eight years. During this period, Bellvitge Hospital has been increasing its robotic surgery year-on-year, making it the Catalan centre with the highest activity in this field. It has six surgical robots, and last year it carried out 1,200 robotic surgeries, accounting for 15.5% of the total in Catalonia.
As highlighted by the Descriptive Study of Robotic Surgery in Catalonia, prepared by AQuAS, the Catalan Agency for Health Quality and Evaluation, Bellvitge Hospital has performed more than 5,700 robotic surgeries between 2018 and 2025, and was the first centre to exceed a thousand procedures of this kind in 2024.
In recent weeks, the HUB has incorporated its 6th surgical robot, the Symani, for microsurgery and supermicrosurgery procedures, and has reached 300 kidney transplants using robotic surgery. In a comprehensive study, the research documents the evolution of robotic surgery in Catalonia between 2018 and 2025, highlighting the spectacular increase in activity in the country as the first major relevant finding. The report underlines the ‘sustained and linear increase in the proportion of all surgical procedures’.
In this way, robotic surgery has risen from representing 0.25% of all surgical procedures to 1.59%, with an average annual increase of 0.18 percentage points. The study notes that although robotic surgery still accounts for a small proportion of all interventions, the annual trend is upward, statistically significant and consistent across different clinical specialities and types of procedures.
As for the number of SISCAT hospitals performing robotic surgeries, the figure is also very positive, as it has risen from 10 centres in 2018 to 24 hospitals that have performed at least one procedure with a robot over the past year.
The growth in the use of robotic surgery in Catalonia is concentrated in the gastrointestinal and respiratory specialities, with some particularly notable cases, such as prostatectomy, where robotic surgery has now become the predominant method.