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Thriving & Surviving As A First Year Consultant

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“You never have a second chance to make a first impression.” 

How you initially come across to your colleagues, the nurses and your patients as a newly appointed consultant can set the tone for your consultancy for the rest of your career. Once an opinion (winner or loser) has been formed about you, it is virtually set in stone. It is much too important to leave these things to chance. In your first year you will either sink, float or swim!

 ‘Thriving and Surviving as a new consultant’ [1] is a course by The Urology Foundation (TUF) specifically designed to help consultants at the start of their careers take control of situations and to become good leaders, colleagues and, most importantly, good medics. Good communication and presentation skills are vital to how others perceive and respond to you; fortunately these can be learned and developed. More importantly, leaders are not born, they can be made and it is possible to improve and hone your skills and attributes so that you can become a more confident and natural leader.

A good or natural leader always features a strong resume. a robust resume not only emphasis an excellent impression on the interviewer but also step up your confidence. the primary and most vital factor that contributes to obtaining an honest job is that the resume. Building knowledgeable resume that stands call at the gang can sometimes end up to be an intimidating, confusing and stressful task. But, with the advancement in technology building knowledgeable resume has become quite easy.

The resume builder online is one such innovation that has made professional resume building easy, efficient and fewer stressful. The professional resume builder saves tons of quality time which may be utilized for other purposes like gaining education or developing skills. you only got to fill within the details within the appropriate fields mentioned within the resume template online and knowledgeable resume is produced in minutes.

Last weekend,  a number of newly, or about to be appointed, consultants attended an interactive two-day course in Leeds where subjects such as team building and development were discussed. “The team” was considered to be the colleagues, managers, nurses and other healthcare professionals involved in the urological care of patients. We discussed and debated how we could create the “Manchester United” department of urology, delivering the best possible in patient treatment and care.

A new consultant shouldn’t try to change too much at first, but instead carefully assess and evaluate the lie of the land. Learning about the department, associated departments and the hospital itself takes time and trouble. It is good though to have at least five SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-constrained) goals to be achieved within the first year of his or her appointment. But what should these be? Do let us know.

The medical defence organisations recognise that the first year of a consultant’s career is one of exceptionally high risk for complaints and litigation. We focused therefore on avoiding pitfalls, dealing with complications, and responding to complaints and serious untoward incidents (SUOs).

Navigating your way though the dangerous waters of your first year as a consultant can be a very tricky business. We would love to hear about your experiences in that situation, or, if you attended the course, what you thought of it and how we could do it better.

Roger Kirby, The Prostate Centre, London

Louise de Winter, Chief Executive, The Urology Foundation

[1] The course was made possible by an Educational Grant from Takeda UK Ltd. Takeda had no involvement in the content of organisation of the meeting.

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Why I care about social media – and why you should too

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I was born in the ‘Eighties’. I was a teenager when the Internet first became accessible to the general public and a medical student when Facebook was launched in 2004. It seems improbable and surreal that my time spent ‘liking’ and ‘poking’ Facebook posts from college acquaintances would someday be of any use to my career and research. Indeed, ‘I was there’ at the very beginnings of social media, but I had little idea of what it would become.

The social media revolution started in the early millennium, with the emergence of blogs: microsites consisting of topical entries usually displayed in reverse chronological order. Blogs, such as Deadspin or Gizmodo, became pillars of the new era, breaking news at an unprecedented pace and gaining millions of page views by the second. Meanwhile, the print media were slow to adopt a digital strategy, often branding the aforementioned websites as ‘hacks’ or ‘teenagers with a lack of journalistic integrity’. Almost simultaneously, a website called Wikipedia was launched on 15 January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, a ‘social’ alternative to bulky reference books, such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Fleetingly, Wikipedia rose to fame and grew at an exponential rate, drawing along a significant chunk of web traffic. It caught idlers with such haste that some felt the need to ban the website from classrooms. Oh my, have things changed. In September 2010, Arthur Sulzberger Jr, Chairman and publisher of The New York Times, announced that the prestigious journal would cease to exist in print, sometime in the not-so-far future. In related news, the Chicago-based company behind the Britannica announced that it would stop printing the revered reference encyclopaedia after >200 years in press.

The adoption of new technology in any and every field follows a simple bell curve, as described in a sociological model by Joe Bohlen et al. at Iowa State University. The hypothesis indicates that the first group of individuals to use a new product is called ‘innovators’, followed by ‘early adopters’. The early and late majorities follow these, and the last group to ultimately adopt a product is called ‘laggards’. ‘Medicine’ as a collective crowd is usually the laggard. On one hand, it is reasonable and understandable that a field with such enormous responsibilities be as meticulous and practical in the process of adopting new drugs, technologies or paradigms. It is entirely within the realm of comprehension that a new drug must succeed at many stages of testing to show unequivocal safety and efficacy before being accepted into medical practice. Yet, on the other hand, most would safely agree that institution, tradition and dogma dominate the world of medicine, and most notoriously in surgical sub-specialties. Not unlike our most recent history in adopting robotic surgery, met initially with ferocious and apocalyptic discontent, many contemporary leaders in our field display excessive scepticism towards social media, even when its dissemination is widespread through all echelons of society. In an era where wars and revolutions are being fought over Twitter, and where the likelihood of experiencing an influenza pandemic can be accurately predicted based on relevant social media buzz, I am not sure what doctors are waiting for to accept social media for what it is – an inevitable revolution in how we communicate.

As many of you ponder whether or not to embrace social media, there is good evidence that medicine has finally absorbed the latest innovation. I could cite many factual titbits to demonstrate that this is in fact true. I could provide propensity-matched-instrumental-variable-adjusted analyses to show its benefits. Yet, wise men once said that stories, not statistics, drive change: here are some stories of how social media has already transformed our field.

The ‘uro-twitterverse’ is now a rich and engaging planet of its own. Since November 2012, >100, I am not making the numbers up, users engage in a monthly Urology journal club on Twitter, enhanced by the presence of the lead investigator of the study open for discussion. Even the most prestigious of first-tier Ivy League institutions would not be able to attract lead authors to attend every single journal club, even less to convince a pool of key opinion leaders from around the world to comment and critique these studies.

Every day, I know that I can turn to my fellow ‘Twitterati’ to ask a hard clinical question. Should I perform a lymph node dissection in this patient with prostate cancer? What is the value of positron-emission tomography-CT to assess recurrence in a patient with bladder cancer? What is the recommended evaluation for a patient with suspected interstitial cystitis? Across 24 standard time zones, I know that an answer is a couple of seconds away. Somewhere in the world, a knowledgeable authority is answering my tweet, either while reading the morning news at breakfast, between two major cases in the operating theatre, or checking the Internet right before going to sleep. Having Twitter on my smartphone is a click away from being at a grand rounds talk, with everyone – from Benjamin Davies to Stacy Loeb – in attendance.

Every year, physicians travel thousands of miles to attend medical conferences. Many academics converge at these meetings with the hope of building relationships with potential collaborators. Twitter has brought the academic world under a single digital roof. Most of my research collaborators are on Twitter. I exchange direct messages with them every day to discuss research, grant and collaborative opportunities. I met several of my peers and collaborators on Twitter before actually gathering in person. In fact, many have questioned the need for so-called ‘formal’ medical conferences in the new digital era. While I am not ready to cancel my annual trip to the AUA and the European Association of Urology meetings – especially when they are being held at exotic destinations, such as San Diego and Milan, these social phenomena suggest that change is inevitable.

As much as we like the world we are accustomed to living in, there is little doubt that scientific journals, professional societies, and medical institutions need to adapt to this growing revolution. And, as regrettably experienced by traditional portals, e.g. the print media, those who do not will struggle to remain relevant. Of course, there are caveats to social media. How do we set boundaries between patient care and personal endeavours? Regardless of these issues, society has dreamt forever of the open and free opportunities provided by social media. The world cannot wait.

At BJUI, we are using social media, especially Twitter and Facebook, to highlight the most important international studies published in the journal, e.g. July’s ‘Article of the Month’ from Taiwan comparing tract creation using plasma vaporization with balloon dilatation in percutaneous nephrolithotomy.

Quoc-Dien Trinh
BJUI Associate Editor Health Services Research,
Department of Surgery and Center for Surgery and Public Health, Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.

 

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Uro-oncology Highlights from #BAUS13

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The BAUS annual meeting in Manchester proved hugely enjoyable and notable for the high level of educational content and the quality of the speakers involved. There was a clear emphasis on the increasing role of the web and social media in urological education in the UK, and it was exciting to hear @prokarurol lay out his vision for the BJUI in this regard.

All subspecialties were well represented at BAUS, but I would like to focus particularly on urologic oncology, which was the subject of a number of excellent sessions.

Before that, I would like to show you some the Symplur data on social media traffic at #baus13:

This figure shows that 88 people people engaged with the #baus13 hashtag, many of many of whom were not in Manchester or even in the UK. Using the complex algoritim on their website, they calculate that the 556 tweets sent led to over 340,000 impressions in social media and other digital spaces. 

The traffic each day was impressive and the largest spike happened during the BJUI Social Media Course. Well done to all who tweeted from the meeting.

Professor Ben Lee from Tulane University, New Orleans gave two fascinating talks on Tuesday and Thursday morning regarding novel imaging techniques to facilitate uro-oncologic diagnosis and treatment. He quoted work from Dr. Peter Pinto from @theNCI demonstrating the utility of MRI-TRUS fusion targeted biopsies which detected cancer in 37% of patients with a negative initial TRUS, 11% of whom had high-grade disease. He also discussed novel imaging techniques that may enter uro-oncology practice in the future, including diffuse reflectance imaging and confocal microscopy with fluorescein staining. These techniques may allow intraoperative assessment of oncologic margins at the histological level, and there has been some success with this in the field of breast lumpectomy. One final innovation is the development of a patient-specific simulator for minimally invasive renal surgery. This allows a patient’s CT imaging to be reconstructed into a virtual 3d model, allowing the surgeon to practice that individual patient’s procedure prior to putting knife to skin for real.

Wednesday morning’s session, chaired by Tim O’Brien, aimed to address a variety of contemporary issues across urological oncology. Mr. Ed Rowe and Dr. Stephen Tolchard from Bristol presented their experience of CPEX testing prior to radical cystectomy. Their series demonstrated that CPEX testing was highly predictive of the risk of post-op complications, whereas ASA grade performed poorly. The ability to assess risk pre-operatively is clearly going to be vital to the publication of properly risk-adjusted individual surgeon outcomes, and CPEX testing may be a useful way to do this.

Professor Tom Treasure from UCL was asked to make sense of pulmonary metastasectomy. He pointed to the difficulty of selection bias towards fitter patients with low volume disease who are likely to survive for longer regardless of the effect of the surgery. Prospective randomised trials are needed, but lacking.

Professor Markus Graefen won widespread acclaim for his presentation of the merits of the very high volume radical prostatectomy practice at the Martini clinic in Hamburg. Particularly impressive was the use of continuous statistical monitoring of results, so that incremental technical improvements could be identified and disseminated between surgeons.

The morning session concluded with Dr. Arthur Grollman giving an intriguing account of how Aristolochia herb ingestion was finally established as the underlying cause for Balkan endemic nephropathy.

Wednesday saw another session organised by the Section of Oncology, this time chaired by Mr. Simon Brewster and focussing on active surveillance (AS) for prostate cancer. The session format made use of short, punchy presentations from a variety of speakers addressing controversies in patient selection and protocols for active surveillance.

Professor Graefen returned to discuss surgical and pathological outcomes following delayed RP after active surveillance. He quoted work led by Ruth Etzioni that used a simulation model derived from large active surveillance and radical prostatectomy cohorts to predict comparative outcomes for immediate and deferred treatment. Only very modest reductions in cancer-specific survival with deferred treatment were predicted, with treatment able to be deferred for a median of 6.4 years.

Those data relate to men with low-risk prostate cancer, but what about active surveillance for intermediate-risk disease? Dr. Parker argued the case for, pointing to only 2 of 88 men in the Royal Marsden series developing PSA failure, and one death. @declangmurphy argued for caution however, pointing to the fact that 12 of 92 men in this category from the Göteborg screening study had progressed to require androgen deprivation therapy at a median follow-up of 6 years, which has to be regarded as a poor outcome from surveillance. There was general agreement however that intermediate-risk cancers are a heterogeneous group and that more sophisticated risk stratification is required. Biomarkers may be part of the answer, and Professor Martin Gleave gave an eloquent update including the new multiple gene expression panels that are becoming commercially available in the US.

Further presentations addressed the topic of how to evaluate men entering active surveillance. Mr. Brewster stressed the pitfalls in relying on PSA kinetics alone, given that they perform poorly as a predictor of adverse pathology or recurrence following radical prostatectomy for progression on biopsy-based criteria. Mr. Declan Cahill strongly advocated transperineal template biopsies as routine prior to enrolment and for repeat biopsies, pointing to an upgrading rate of 1/3 at Guy’s where all patients entering AS are offered transperineal biopsies. Professor Freddy Hamdy made the case for avoiding routine repeat transrectal biopsies, given that changes in grade/volume may be an artefact of inadequate sampling, and therefore unhelpful. Finally, Professor Mark Emberton discussed the current role of imaging, making the case for pre-biopsy multiparametric MRI which can exclude tumour foci down to a size of 0.2cc with 95% accuracy and allows targeted biopsies as mentioned earlier. Whether a man with a raised PSA and a negative MRI can safely avoid a biopsy however, remains an open question. MRI may also prove to be a safe, non-invasive way to monitor tumours for progression on AS, reducing the need for repeat biopsy.

Professor Gleave then switched the focus to castrate-resistant disease in the Prostate Cancer UK Guest lecture. Along with a masterful overview of androgen receptor pathways and novel endocrine therapies, he urged us as urologists to get involved in the administration of these agents. Whilst presently utilised post-chemotherapy, they are likely to move into the pre-chemo setting and possibly even replace LHRH analogues for hormone-naïve patients.

Thursday saw an oncologically-orientated @BJUI sub-plenary session chaired by @prokarurol. @jdhdavis provided some great insights into the utility and technique of robotic extended pelvic lymph node dissection in prostate cancer. @qdtrinh gave a fascinating insight into the complexities of health services research, as well as outlining some recent data regarding complications of robotic vs. open radical prostatectomy. Finally, Professor Rob Pickard discussed the recent health technology assessment addressing the relative cost-effectiveness of robotic and laparoscopic radical prostatectomy. Whilst the model requires a number of assumptions, it seems clear that centralisation of robotic surgery into high-volume centres is much more likely to result in acceptable cost-effectiveness, not to mention improved outcomes for patients.

In summary this has been a fantastic BAUS meeting for uro-oncological topics in particular and one I have thoroughly enjoyed attending. It seems the future uro-oncologist will need to be able to interpret and integrate advanced imaging techniques into their practice, make sophisticated decisions about when and how to defer treatment for prostate cancer, utilise a broad range of non-surgical treatments, and provide the very best surgical outcomes in a new era of transparency. I’m looking forward to the challenges ahead.

Ben Jackson
ST7 in Urological Surgery, Royal Derby Hospital
@Ben_L_jackson

 

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Social media @BJUIjournal – what a start!

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When Prokar Dasgupta assumed the role of new Editor-in-Chief of the BJUI in January 2013, he outlined his vision and some of the major changes that the Journal would make as it transitioned to a new editorial team. After 10 years of progress under John Fitzpatrick, it was clear that we are now working in a much-changed publishing landscape, one which will change even more in the next few years. In particular, the way in which medical professionals receive information and interact with colleagues, patients, journals and other professional groups is unrecognisable from what it was just 2 or 3 years ago.

Social media is the driver of much of this change. It has transformed the way in which the current generation of trainees interact—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Urban Spoon, Expedia, Trip Advisor, Instagram – all of these platforms are key conduits for how Generation Z experiences life. This generation will find the idea of a printed journal arriving in the post every month to be anathema. In a world with an ever-increasing amount of content being produced, and much competition for our limited attention span, Gen Z live their lives through mobile platforms capable of delivering the precise content they want, immediately to their devices. Not just that, this content, whether that be breaking news via Twitter, friend status updates on Facebook, job opportunities via LinkedIn, is delivered through vibrant media that allows them to engage and respond by liking, sharing, favourite-ing, re-tweeting and commenting, even as the content reaches them. All of this activity is done through convenient and increasingly pervasive mobile platforms while on the train to work, while queuing for a coffee, between cases in theatre, during a lecture, first thing in the morning, last thing at night. Gen Z will not seek out this type of content – it will seek them out and be delivered straight to their timeline/twitter-feed.

The BJUI is the first surgical journal to introduce an Associate Editor for Social Media. The aim is to devise and implement a strategy to ensure that the BJUI evolves in this new world; to ensure that the next generation of trainees find us a meaningful organisation to engage with and be informed, educated and entertained by. Our fellow Associate Editor, Matt Bultitude (Web) plays an important role here as do our publishers, our Executive team and Editor-in-Chief.

 

Our social media platforms

So what have we done? If you are on Twitter or Facebook you will have noticed that BJUI has come to life on these key social media platforms.

Between January and April 2013, our followers on Twitter have grown from by one third to over 1300, and continue to grow at over 100 followers per month. Through Twitter alone, we have generated huge traffic back to our website with over 3500 link clicks from the hundreds of interactions we have had during this period.

 

 

Advanced social media metrics allow us to measure all of this activity against other organisations active in urology. For example our Klout score has increased from 46 to 55 with a corresponding increase in our Peerindex rating. We are leading the field across all of the key domains we have targeted to date and continue to make progress as we introduce further changes at www.bjui.org in 2013.

Our Facebook site is now highly engaging and is constantly updated with news and content from our website.

 

 

We have recorded over 133 000 page impressions by 23 000 Facebook visitors in the first 3 months of 2013, a huge rise from previously, and all of this traffic gets directed back to content at www.bjui.org, whether that be a Journal article, blog, picture quiz or our new ‘Poll of the Week’.

 

 

Our YouTube site is updated with videos from authors and other multimedia content to complement citable articles published in the Journal. You will see a lot more content added here in coming months.

 

Blogs@BJUI

But perhaps the most talked-about area we have introduced is Blogs@BJUI. And although we are the first mainstream urology journal to introduce a blog site, other journals have done so with great success. In September, we visited the social media team at the BMJ to get some tips on how they had developed their social media strategy into the very successful multi-platform spectacular, which they now oversee. Juliet Dobson, Blogs Editor and Assistant Web Editor at the BMJ offered some excellent advice to help us get up and running and their former Editor, Richard Smith, remains one of the bloggers we most admire. BMJ Blogs is well worth a visit for aspiring bloggers to read some of the best.

We launched our new web journal on the 2 January 2013 to coincide with the new Editor taking the helm, and also published our first blog that day. From then until April 2013, Blogs@BJUI has featured the following:

  • 51 blogs contributed by 25 authors on three continents
  • 193 comments from all over the world, including opinion from some household names in academic urology
  • 16 editorial blogs from our specialty Associate Editors
  • 4 blogs from major urology conferences
  • Multidisciplinary contributions from both authors and comment-leavers

The topics have included everything from urology humour, through the European Working Time Directive, reality TV and an eminent urologist describing his recent personal experience of robotic radical prostatectomy. Our contributors have included many of the key opinion leaders in social media in urology, many of whom are rising stars or already established in academic urology. Also established urology opinion-leaders who are rather new to social media but enjoying the challenge! Other contributors are young trainees who have proved themselves to be talented bloggers already. Blogs@BJUI has been highly successful at driving traffic to the Article of the Week as improving quality remains our main objective.

Also of note is the impact that social media has made at urology conferences in the past few months. As part of a planned strategy, the BJUI social media team has been very active posting updates on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube from major urology conferences, thereby increasing the reach of these meetings to a much larger audience and also allowing those following on social media to engage pro-actively with the conference. This has been a very successful strategy; social media metrics confirm that the BJUI team has been leading the social media revolution at this year’s Annual European Association of Urology (EAU) Congress:

 

 

We had set a target that by the end of the first quarter we would have 1000 readers per month visiting Blogs@BJUI. By the end of the February, we had already had over 9000 visits to our blog site! Each reader spent over 3.5 min reading the web journal and many of them left comments or pushed out links using Twitter or Facebook. We have had many comments posted by readers from every corner of the world and have enjoyed some very humorous posts. For us, social media is all about engagement. We want to use these platforms to allow readers to passively engage with us by liking, sharing, tweeting content that they enjoy whether that is a full paper in the BJUI, a blog post, YouTube video, weekly poll or Picture Quiz of the Week. And for those who want to engage more actively, we strongly encourage you to join the conversation and add a comment.

So we have had a great start to our social media push at the BJUI. And there will be a lot more to come in the coming months. For those of you who are new to social media, we encourage you to dip your toes in by reading a blog or two and adding a comment. Before you know it you will have downloaded the Twitter app to your smartphone and you’ll be off and running! For the Twitterati, we thank you for all your enthusiasm in helping us get social media up and running at the BJUI and we look forward to your blogs, mentions, re-tweets and podcasts over the coming months. Social media is all about engagement – join the conversation @BJUIjournal.

Declan G. Murphy and Marnique Basto

Division of Cancer Surgery, University of Melbourne, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Melbourne, Australia


Declan Murphy is Associate Editor for Social Media at the BJUI.
Follow him on Twitter @declangmurphy

The BJUI Social Media Awards 2013

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The BJUI has been very pleased with the large amount of social media activity we have seen across our various platforms since January 2013 when the new-look Journal was introduced. Editor-in-Chief, Prokar Dasgupta, has decreed that he wants the BJUI to be “the most-read surgical journal on the web”, and has recognised the key role that social media plays in realizing this ambition. At the same time, the social media revolution that has engrossed Gen Y and Gen Z and which has transformed the way in which news is communicated, has now taken a foothold in scientific publishing and is evolving.

To recognise the rapidly growing interest in social media in urology, and also to acknowledge those who have played a major role in advancing social media in urology at the BJUI and elsewhere, we this year inaugurated the BJUI Social Media Awards, presented for the first time at the AUA recently. Individuals and organisations were recognised across 20 categories including the top gong, The BJUI Social Media Award 2013, awarded to an individual or organization who has made an outstanding contribution to social media in urology in the preceding year.

This year’s Awards Ceremony was held in the Dublin Square Irish Bar in San Diego during the AUA Annual Meeting. Sixty of the World’s leading social media enthusiasts (the “Uro-Twitterati”), gathered to meet up in person and to see who would be recognised. Sort of like the Oscars but without the wardrobe malfunctions. Yours truly played the role of MC. While most of the awards recognised genuine achievements in social media, there were a few “special” categories which recognised some reasonably strange activity propagated through social media channels!

Todd Morgan and Alex Kutikov, the brains behind Draw MD Urology and Urology Match who won the top award of the evening.

We were delighted to have recipients from all categories present at the ceremony including representatives from the AUA and EAU. The BJUI Social Media Awards Ceremony was competing with the European Urology Cocktail Reception a couple of blocks away but in the spirit of conviviality which we encourage, we welcomed European Urology Editor-in-Chief elect, Dr Jim Catto, and managing editor Cathy Pierce, who popped in for a drink and to collect the EAU awards.

A special thanks to my research fellow Dr Marni Basto who organised this year’s awards, and to Scott Millar and Helena Kasprowicz at BJUI in London who manage our social media and website activity.

For more pictures from the evening, please visit BJUI Associate Editor John Davies Flickr page.

 

Declan Murphy is Associate Editor for Social Media at BJUI. He is a uro-oncologist in Melbourne, Australia

Follow Declan on Twitter @declangmurphy 

 

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John Davis, BJUI Associate Editor: Urological Oncology

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John Davis, BJUI Associate Editor for urological oncology, talks about why authors should submit to the BJUI.

The aim of the Journal is to publish high-quality papers with high-impact statements. Along with rapid reviews and publication, BJUI is supporting the impact of papers through social media, such as Twitter and Facebook. The journal will still be printed monthly, but additionally have an exciting web interface.

Bringing science closer to urologists

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The BJUI has always promoted the best in basic science through its ‘Investigative Urology’ section. However, the new editorial team noticed a small problem – these articles were rarely cited, probably because they were rarely read. As we started speaking to our readers, the truth became rapidly obvious. Most urologists, being clinicians, could not understand the scientific content of these articles. Here was a major challenge. How were we going to attract our surgical readership to science?

Whilst maintaining our commitment to quality, we took three bold steps in discussion with our readership:

  1. Rename the section ‘Translational Science’, so as to highlight the potential clinical relevance of the best basic science papers.
  2. Assemble an editorial team of the best clinician-scientists, not just from molecular and cellular biology but other diverse fields, such as immunology, imaging, engineering and computational sciences.
  3. Precede original science papers with ‘Science made Simple’ articles. These were inspired by the highly successful For Dummies series from Wiley.

The idea behind For Dummies is making everything easier. With >250 million books in print and >1800 titles, For Dummies is the most widely recognised and highly regarded reference series in the world. Since 1991, For Dummies has helped millions make everything easier. Now, Dummies.com is bringing the ‘how-to’ brand online, where readers find proven experts presenting even the most complex subjects in plain English. Whether that means directions on how to hook up a home network, carve a turkey, knit your first scarf, or load your new iPod, you can trust Dummies.com to tell it like it is, without all the technical jargon. For Dummies is a simple, yet powerful concept. It relates to the anxiety and frustration that people feel about technology by poking fun at it with books that are insightful and educational and make difficult material interesting and easy.

Thus we originally thought of publishing articles entitled ‘Science for Dummies’.

Thankfully during a Visiting Professorship in Detroit, one of our science colleagues politely pointed out that urologists are anything but dummies. We have to thank her for suggesting a change of name to ‘Science made Simple’. The format is straightforward – simple language, to the point, along with a simple diagram.

This month we feature an original article on gene fusions in prostate cancer in particular TMPRSS2:ERG. This is made simple by a For Dummies style explanation from Deloar Hossain and David Bostwick. You only have to see the vividly simple diagram to understand how a genetic deletion or translocation can make the joining of two genes possible. Important discoveries of the future will occur if top scientists wherever they maybe, work more closely with their clinical counterparts. We are keen to attract the best science to the BJUI by providing an attractive publishing platform to our best scientists. We also hope that you, our readers will enjoy this new format, engage with quality science in the BJUI, cite these important papers and ultimately relate to their clinical relevance for the benefit of your patients.

Dirk De Ridder, Associate Editor BJUI
Jo Wixon, Publisher BJUI
Prokar Dasgupta, Editor-in-Chief BJUI and King’s Health Partners

 

Design and the new BJUI

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One of the most exciting challenges in magazine design is updating the look of a medical journal. In the past, academic publications did not discernibly change their look, even with editorial changes. A recognised font and layout was perhaps seen to imbue trust and respect, which are important to the integrity of the journal. However, just as editorial content and practice evolves there is great potential in pushing forward design and layout in academic text for both the reader and the editorial team.

WOUND Magazine, Issue 2, Spring 2008, courtesy Ben Slater.

Beyond the content, which aims to be of the highest quality, the experience of the reader as his/her eyes ‘walk’ through the journal is paramount. Take the cover – the ‘old style’ journals serve textual content on their front cover, much like the classical paintings depicting a familiar scene. In the same vein, modern abstract pieces evoke something more intangible, more individual. This is not to say we wanted a design based in abstraction, it is in fact the opposite; we wanted the new design to be relevant to the content, the reader and the field. But we needed to break away from the past, to reflect how we are an exciting specialty and to do this we distilled the essence of The Journal into design elements that acknowledged its past but looked to its future. What you see on the new covers are our amazing treasure trove of ‘Surgery Illustrated’ images from Stephan Spitzer and Joe Thüroff, a clean new font and a subtle wave pattern separating text and image, to herald the energy and change that we are proud to be a part of at the new BJUI. More changes lie within The Journal itself. There is greater emphasis on visual relevance: photography, useful illustrations, prioritising content. Different fonts and sizes have been developed to ensure excellent readability. The gamut of section colours in previous editions has been pared down to allow greater visual cohesion. Our readers have told us that it is simply a more pleasant read, graphically speaking.

The same return to clean lines is seen in the new website, www.bjui.org. Web journals usually have a much bigger audience than the paper versions, as they are easily accessible by non-medical groups. In fact, we discovered this when we did an initial analysis of who actually visited our website: answer, a lot more patients and concerned spouses than we assumed. So easy, clear navigation, with an uncluttered, intuitive design were imperative. The effect is plain to see – the website now feels vital: in addition to fully indexed articles of the week and editorials, it has dynamic image reels, blogs, videos, archives and a social media platform, basically all the things that a paper journal cannot provide. By constantly interacting with our readership, we are at the pulse of what is happening in the urology world and our new website aims to be the best forum to do so. So imagine all this resource packed into a single landing page that adapts to any mobile device or tablet. Good design encourages the reader to stay, explore and engage, rather than become overwhelmed and look elsewhere.

In keeping with the theme of bold design, this month we feature a beautiful article from Bennett et al. accompanied by an editorial from Vincent Zecchini and David Neal. The translational message is simple – bicalutamide enhances autophagy of LNCaP cells, which in turn has a pro-survival effect. The inhibition of autophagy enhances the killing of prostate cancer cells by docetaxel chemotherapy. The article contains not just quality science but stunning images of confocal and phase-contrast microscopy, which feature prominently @BJUI.org.

The design of the BJUI will continue to evolve as we grow and explore more ways to bring our message across the global urological, surgical and scientific communities. What you see is only the start of what we aim to achieve. We hope you enjoy the journey with us.

Tet Yap
Associate Editor (Design)

Prokar Dasgupta
Editor-in-Chief