Need help with good interview questions

[Whole Wheat]

I'm working on a high school graduation project with the topic of robotic surgery, and part of my project is to complete a physical product. Part of my physical product is going to be interviewing a few surgeons in the field and creating a sort of short informative documentary out of it, something that i'm going to show to others to educate on what robotic surgery is and why it could be useful.

For the interviews, I was planning on conducting probably 3 interviews with the same questions, and just grouping the questions together in the documentary. So since I'm showing this to people who may not have been exposed to robotic surgery before, I might have the first question that comes up like "What is robotic surgery," where the surgeons in the documentary would answer that, and so on. Each interview will probably take like 15 minutes max, but I'm having a hard time coming up with good possible questions I could ask to make the documentary better. Is this a good format for the documentary? It'd be a big help if anyone can suggest good questions I could use to make it better.

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[TypeADissection]

Do ask:
- Why should a patient choose a robotic surgery versus conventional laparoscopic or open surgery?
- What are the benefits of robotic surgery?
- Does the robot actually do the surgery (of course we know that the answer is no, but the lay public may not)?

Don't ask:
- Other than higher costs, is there actually any real benefit to robotic surgery versus conventional?

Caveat: I actually don't know that much about robotic surgery. I do have training in it and my program is very proactive in having resident involvement, but I haven't really read much into it because I have no plans on utilizing the Xi in my vascular practice one day. Maybe @ThoracicGuy can offer some insight since it may be an integral part of his practice and training for lung/esophageal work. Cheers.

 

[ThoracicGuy]

Do ask:
- Why should a patient choose a robotic surgery versus conventional laparoscopic or open surgery?
- What are the benefits of robotic surgery?
- Does the robot actually do the surgery (of course we know that the answer is no, but the lay public may not)?

Don't ask:
- Other than higher costs, is there actually any real benefit to robotic surgery versus conventional?

Caveat: I actually don't know that much about robotic surgery. I do have training in it and my program is very proactive in having resident involvement, but I haven't really read much into it because I have no plans on utilizing the Xi in my vascular practice one day. Maybe @ThoracicGuy can offer some insight since it may be an integral part of his practice and training for lung/esophageal work. Cheers.

Actually the only time I've used the robot is at National Meetings. I've never used it clinically.

 

[Smurfette]

I'd keep it simple for a lay-person audience:
--what type of surgeries can be done robotically?
--how did you learn to do robotic surgery?
--What do you like/dislike about it?

To the OP, multiple surgical fields utilize the robot, including urology, gynecology and general surgery as well as its subspecialties. If you're looking at interviewing three people, you might want to try for at least 2 different specialties if possible, to get some more diverse answers and perspectives.

 

[DarknightX]

We used the robot quite a bit during my general surgery residency. Thought it was helpful for visualization in thoracic cases, as you get really good LN dissections and around vessels easier than a VATS. Was also helpful for pelvic dissections such as LARs with mesorectal excision.

Anything else, such as gallbags, complete waste of time and no benefit for patient. Only real benefit in these cases was for marketing.