Surgery: Is total laparoscopic hysterectomy a safe surgical procedure?

Total hysterectomy via laparoscopy is a recently developed technique. Assessment of a new surgical technique, once the operation has been shown to be feasible, requires an evaluation of the risks of complications. Here we report our cumulative 3 year experience with laparoscopic hysterectomy in a total of 222 patients. The overall complication rate was 10.0%. We did not observe any haemorrhage complications requiring another operation. Four patients (1.8%) were re-admitted to hospital but only two of them (0.9%) had to be operated upon again (one vesico-vaginal fistula and one vaginal cuff wound separation). These encouraging results mean that, provided the surgeons are experienced in laparoscopic surgery, total laparoscopic hysterectomy technique would appear not to have a higher rate of complications than hysterectomy via laparotomy or the vaginal route.