The Mancunian Way: The robot surgeon

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Here's the Mancunian Way for today:

Hello,

'HEY FIT BUS DRIVER CALL ME’ read a handwritten note attached to a bus stop in Whitefield this morning. The intended target is not known, but it was spotted and tweeted by Reach journalist and editor Yakub Qureshi.

“Sometimes the old ways are the best ways,” he says, with sincere admiration for the author of the note. “I genuinely thought the internet had killed this kind of thing - which I dimly remember from the bus shelters, school corridors and personal ads sections of the 1990s,” he says.

Who says romance is dead?

This week marks 75 years of the National Health Service - an institution born in Greater Manchester. And though it's impossible to avoid the serious problems facing the service, there is also much to be proud of. We’ll be looking at some of the impressive feats and achievements by NHS staff across Greater Manchester this week, starting with the incredible robot surgeons carrying out procedures at The Christie.

Also today, we’ll be looking at Manchester’s Little Italy parade, the events happening at MIF and discussing the ‘devoted public servant’ who led the review into the Manchester Arena attack.

The vision of a surgeon looming over a patient – defined as ‘open surgery’ – still dominates the popular imagination of an operating theatre. But nowadays, if you’re going for a cancer surgery, it could well be done by a robot controlled by an expert surgeon.

Rafael and Donatello are two multi-million pound ‘da Vinci Surgical System’ robots, newly installed at The