Tag: surgery

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Tiger Testes

March 26, 2013/3 Comments/by Sarah Wilkinson

Although I enjoyed reading Jim Duthie’s Blog Post ‘Surgery Isn’t Normal’, I would argue that no profession, particularly those constituting a high degree of specialization, are normal. Let me set the scene from a research scientist’s perspective…

It was late on a Tuesday night three years ago, and being a poor PhD student at the time (PhD scholarships pay below poverty level), I was completing my part-time work in the histology department to help make the rent. My research laboratory specialises in diseases of the prostate; however, the laboratory next to ours – for which I was currently performing histology work – specialises in germ cell development and male fertility. Most of their work is focused on the human species, however, one of their projects was looking into the fertility of rare or endangered species to help prevent their extinction. As such, they had an ethics agreement with the Melbourne Zoo which gave them access to the reproductive organs of any endangered species that passed away. So there I was on my microtome sectioning the testes of a recently deceased Bengal tiger.

For anyone who works in pathology, the temperature and hydration of tissue to be sectioned must stay within a tight range in order to obtain perfect 5-µM thick sections that can then be stained for analysis. Too hot and your tissue will crumple, too cold and the sections will curl over on themselves, whilst over-hydrated tissues will swell out of the paraffin wax, and under-hydrated tissues break when they meet the microtome’s blade. These tiger testes were getting a little too warm for my liking, so I placed them on ice and left the room to grab myself a beverage from the hospital cafe – cutting testes is thirsty work!

To my dismay when I arrived back at the hospital laboratory my access card would not let me in the room. It was late, no one was around in the histology department, and I was now getting worried about the time these testes had been sitting in water on ice, so I headed for the hospital security. As I stood there explaining to a ICORP Security guard that I urgently needed to get into the histology department on level 3 as my tiger testes were getting too cold and may over hydrate, I too had the realisation of how abnormal this must seem. And yet, the very things that may make my job seem abnormal to an outsider are the very things I love most about my role. Every day is different, and I get exposed to new and exciting research projects that really make a difference to the world and people in it.

This particular job has also come in handy in some unexpected situations. When I caught a man trying to steal the hubcaps off my tyres I was able to tell him, “I may look harmless, but I cut testes for a living,” and so my hubcaps remain…

Dr Sarah Wilkinson is a post-doctoral research fellow at Monash University, Melbourne. She is interested in how the prostate tumour microenvironment can be targeted as a therapeutic treatment for prostate cancer.

Twitter: @wilko3040

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Individualised reporting of surgical outcomes in the UK

March 7, 2013/16 Comments/by Tim OBrien

Its happening and its happening fast. What the cardiothoracic surgeons in the UK have lived with for 8 years is coming to a specialty near you very soon. Individual urological surgeons results to be published openly, in the press in the UK from summer 2013.

It’s a massive change to the way we work and to the way surgical data is presented. No longer will the interesting elements of the urological literature be studies of the results of a few surgeons in a few centres of world renown but rather the performance of outliers. Reports will start to reflect what is achieved throughout the nation not in one or two centres in that nation. Warts and all if you like.

There are risks. Big risks. For surgeons and for patients.

Will surgeons who operate on high risk cases be smeared because they appear to be underperforming?

Will patients who are high risk be denied operations because surgeons subliminally start to make recommendations that are good for the surgeon but not for the patient?

Will surgeons continue to train junior surgeons or will juniors simply cut the stitches?

Why should surgeons carry the can for the performance of the whole team?

Will sample sizes be big enough to ensure that results could not be due to chance?

What outcomes should we be measuring in order to judge the quality of many operations?

Who should collect the data – the surgeons or independent reviewers?

Are surgeons going to be tabloid fodder?

Is it simply time to head for the hills with a cigar and a bottle of red…..

In cardiac surgery all these were live questions and they have worked it out. Standards have been shown to be astonishingly high. Will urology be the same? The specialities have been challenged to come up with a plan. Why not contribute to that process and add to the blog….

Tim O’Brien is a Consultant Urological Surgeon at Guy’s and St Thomas’s NHS Hospital, London. His views are his own.

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Article of the week: Prostate cancer treatments: How much do you want to spend?

February 27, 2013/1 Comment/by admin Z.9

Every week the Editor-in-Chief selects the Article of the Week from the current issue of BJUI. The abstract is reproduced below and you can click on the button to read the full article, which is freely available to all readers for at least 30 days from the time of this post.

In addition to the article itself, there is an accompanying editorial written by a prominent member of the urological community. This blog is intended to provoke comment and discussion and we invite you to use the comment tools at the bottom of each post to join the conversation.

Finally, the third post under the Article of the Week heading on the homepage will consist of additional material or media. This week we feature a video of Matthew Cooperberg discussing his paper.

If you only have time to read one article this week, it should be this one.

Primary treatments for clinically localised prostate cancer: a comprehensive lifetime cost-utility analysis

Matthew R. Cooperberg, Naren R. Ramakrishna^†, Steven B. Duff*, Kathleen E. Hughes^‡, Sara Sadownik^‡, Joseph A. Smith^§ and Ashutosh K. Tewari^¶

Departments of Urology and Epidemiology and Biostatistics, UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, San Francisco, CA, *Veritas Health Economics Consulting, Inc., Carlsbad, CA, ^†Department of Radiation Oncology, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Orlando, FL, ^‡Avalere Health LLC, Washington, DC, ^§Department of Urologic Surgery, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, and ^¶Department of Urology, Cornell University, New York, NY, USA

Read the full article

OBJECTIVE

• To characterise the costs and outcomes associated with radical prostatectomy (open, laparoscopic, or robot-assisted) and radiation therapy (RT: dose-escalated three-dimensional conformal RT, intensity-modulated RT, brachytherapy, or combination), using a comprehensive, lifetime decision analytical model.

PATIENTS AND METHODS

• A Markov model was constructed to follow hypothetical men with low-, intermediate-, and high-risk prostate cancer over their lifetimes after primary treatment; probabilities of outcomes were based on an exhaustive literature search yielding 232 unique publications.

• In each Markov cycle, patients could have remission, recurrence, salvage treatment, metastasis, death from prostate cancer, and death from other causes.

• Utilities for each health state were determined, and disutilities were applied for complications and toxicities of treatment.

• Costs were determined from the USA payer perspective, with incorporation of patient costs in a sensitivity analysis.

RESULTS

• Differences across treatments in quality-adjusted life years across methods were modest, ranging from 10.3 to 11.3 for low-risk patients, 9.6–10.5 for intermediate-risk patients and 7.8–9.3 for high-risk patients.

• There were no statistically significant differences among surgical methods, which tended to be more effective than RT methods, with the exception of combined external beam + brachytherapy for high-risk disease.

• RT methods were consistently more expensive than surgical methods; costs ranged from $19 901 (robot-assisted prostatectomy for low-risk disease) to $50 276 (combined RT for high-risk disease).

• These findings were robust to an extensive set of sensitivity analyses.

CONCLUSIONS

• Our analysis found small differences in outcomes and substantial differences in payer and patient costs across treatment alternatives.

• These findings may inform future policy discussions about strategies to improve efficiency of treatment selection for localised prostate cancer.

Read Previous Articles of the Week

Editorial: Valuing interventions for localised prostate cancer

February 27, 2013/2 Comments/by Robert Pickard

Robert Pickard and Luke Vale

Governments of all nations struggle to work out how best to use the limited resources available for health care. One key area of uncertainty is long term conditions with multiple therapeutic options including no active treatment, where relative merits of different treatments are unclear and there is associated unexplained variation in use of often expensive interventions such as surgery. The management of localised prostate cancer typifies this situation. The problem is how to decide the relative worth of options especially as this judgement might differ between patients, clinicians, providers and funders. The best way is to perform well designed randomised trials between competing interventions with sufficient follow-up to identify any differences. For localised prostate cancer the ProTect trial is due to report in 2014. In the meantime, health care agencies commission Health Technology Assessments (HTA) to comparatively value interventions usually on the basis of the monetary cost of the added benefit they give in terms of better outcomes. This is commonly measured as the extra cost of each additional quality-adjusted life year (QALY) they give. The well laid out paper by Cooperberg et al. certainly adds to previous similar work that is available on relevant health agency websites (HTA 2003, CADTH 2011, HTA 2011, HTA 2012), but was interestingly funded by an industrial stakeholder, Intuitive Surgical. Given its perspective focusing predominantly on Medicare tariffs, it is perhaps most relevant to the US Government who pays these rates, but careful reading by all will at the very least give a flavour of the use of predictive statistical and economic modelling of the possible benefits to patients, and costs to funders of the treatments advised by clinicians.

It is important to highlight that the methods of meta-analysis of the existing literature used by Cooperberg et al. are unclear – this makes it hard to critique whether the best data have been used in the model. Furthermore, the data analyses are unusual. A more typical presentation would have been to explore the likelihood that each treatment would be considered cost-effective. The method used does not really illustrate whether the conclusion should be that there are no differences between treatments or whether there is insufficient evidence to determine whether there are differences. Furthermore, although baseline characteristics of patients included in the meta-analysis are not given it is likely that some would differ between men undergoing surgery or radiotherapy leading to bias in outcome. The linear Markov model used is also perhaps an inadequate reflection of reality since it does not appear to calculate QALYs for repeated transit through further cancer treatment/remission/recurrence states and between incontinent/continent and sexual dysfunction/no sexual dysfunction states which men would value specifically and independently. In terms of costs the have included costs of patient recovery time. Arguably recovery should be captured within the QALY measure and to include it again under costs might be an element of double counting. In addition they showed that the results were sensitive to certain assumptions that may be questioned such as the four year shorter time to metastasis after biochemical recurrence for radiotherapy.

Cooperberg et al. have certainly provided a useful example of how different treatments supervised by clinicians may be valued by those that pay the bills. A parting thought is if only clinicians of differing specialties could collaborate on large definitive RCTs we would not need to rely on predictive models based on imperfect data.

Robert Pickard is a Professor of Urology at the Institute of Cellular Medicine, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. email: [email protected]

Luke Vale is Health Foundation Chair in Health Economics at the Institute of Health & Society, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. email: [email protected]

Read the full article

Video: Dr Cooperberg’s article commentary on prostate cancer treatment

February 27, 2013/by admin Z.9

Primary treatments for clinically localised prostate cancer: a comprehensive lifetime cost-utility analysis

Matthew R. Cooperberg, Naren R. Ramakrishna^†, Steven B. Duff*, Kathleen E. Hughes^‡, Sara Sadownik^‡, Joseph A. Smith^§ and Ashutosh K. Tewari^¶

Read the full article

OBJECTIVE

PATIENTS AND METHODS

• In each Markov cycle, patients could have remission, recurrence, salvage treatment, metastasis, death from prostate cancer, and death from other causes.

• Utilities for each health state were determined, and disutilities were applied for complications and toxicities of treatment.

• Costs were determined from the USA payer perspective, with incorporation of patient costs in a sensitivity analysis.

RESULTS

• RT methods were consistently more expensive than surgical methods; costs ranged from $19 901 (robot-assisted prostatectomy for low-risk disease) to $50 276 (combined RT for high-risk disease).

• These findings were robust to an extensive set of sensitivity analyses.

CONCLUSIONS

• Our analysis found small differences in outcomes and substantial differences in payer and patient costs across treatment alternatives.

• These findings may inform future policy discussions about strategies to improve efficiency of treatment selection for localised prostate cancer.

Surgery is Not Normal

February 21, 2013/4 Comments/by James Duthie

The man was unconscious on the operating table, in lithotomy position and fully prepped for the major extirpative surgery which he was about to undergo. Four of us from different surgical specialities stood around his nether regions with arms folded, having all done a very thorough bimanual examination. We were discussing whether his recurrent colorectal cancer felt mobile enough to get away with a posterior exenteration, or if all the pelvic organs had to go. As we considered the physical exam findings it occurred to me that this was not a normal situation. I looked at the patient and said to the head of Colo-Rectal surgery, “you know, in some workplaces people discuss things around the watercooler”. All of a sudden the stark reality of this bizarre situation was apparent as it might be to the casual observer.

Surgery is not normal, and neither are surgeons.

Surgical training is not normal. Much has been written about the unique legal status that medical trainees have, whereby they may dismember dead human bodies with impunity in the course of their education. As training progresses we are not only allowed, but expected to assault people with an array of sterilized weapons, so long as we expect that they will be better off for it. Only a fool would promise this will definitely be the case of course. Less has been written about the fact that it is not normal to be occasionally scolded in your workplace like a school kid and given “homework” in your thirties. It only seems normal because our colleagues seem to accept it.

That surgeons are not normal, I believe, is both self-selection and indoctrination.

Even the kindest, most humane surgeons have steel beneath the surface in my experience. At best, this is only revealed when advocating for a patient, such as demanding theatre access for an urgent after-hours case, but at worst…we have all met that surgeon. Almost all of us have surely had to grit our teeth late one night performing a procedure at the limit of our ability, unable or unwilling to call for help. Timid people do not self-select for surgery. In most countries the process requires an at least somewhat forceful personality to get through selection interviews. A certain drive is required to jump through the necessary hoops and survive the long hours and emotional trauma of the training. Once training begins, as is the case in the military, the majority of waking hours are spent with colleagues in the same environment, but sometimes in different locations. No-one on the outside truly understands the unique demands on the individual. Survival tips are shared, but competition is fierce even when unspoken. Even closest friends can be an obstacle to getting enough experience.

My non-medical father called me one evening some years ago and asked how busy I was. I told him “not bad”, I just had to knock out an appendix and I was almost done. He was taken aback by what seemed a cavalier attitude to what must be a frightened 18 year old about to undergo an anaesthetic for the first time and have his belly cut into. If you are a surgeon, it is understood that no-one has the emotional resources to care this much for every one of the endless multitude of people we treat. I care very much about doing my job as well as I can, but out of necessity I do not routinely involve myself in their personal drama. This would impact my ability to make them better.

Is that normal?

James Duthie is a Uro-Oncology Trainee (Robot Surgery) at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Melbourne. He is interested in Human Factors Engineering, & making people better through electronic means. @Jamesduthie1

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Article of the week: Reality check: simulators are effective training tools for robotic surgery

February 20, 2013/by admin Z.9

If you only have time to read one article this week, it should be this one.

Current status of validation for robotic surgery simulators – a systematic review

Hamid Abboudi, Mohammed S. Khan, Omar Aboumarzouk*, Khurshid A. Guru†, Ben Challacombe, Prokar Dasgupta and Kamran Ahmed

MRC Centre for Transplantation, King’s College London, King’s Health Partners, Department of Urology, Guy’s Hospital, London, *Department of Urology, Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, Aberdeen, UK, and †Department of Urology, Roswell Park Center for Robotic Surgery, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Buffalo, New York, USA

Read the full article

To analyse studies validating the effectiveness of robotic surgery simulators. The MEDLINE^®, EMBASE^® and PsycINFO^® databases were systematically searched until September 2011. References from retrieved articles were reviewed to broaden the search. The simulator name, training tasks, participant level, training duration and evaluation scoring were extracted from each study. We also extracted data on feasibility, validity, cost-effectiveness, reliability and educational impact. We identified 19 studies investigating simulation options in robotic surgery. There are five different robotic surgery simulation platforms available on the market. In all, 11 studies sought opinion and compared performance between two different groups; ‘expert’ and ‘novice’. Experts ranged in experience from 21–2200 robotic cases. The novice groups consisted of participants with no prior experience on a robotic platform and were often medical students or junior doctors. The Mimic dV-Trainer^®, ProMIS^®, SimSurgery Educational Platform^® (SEP) and Intuitive systems have shown face, content and construct validity. The Robotic Surgical SimulatorTM system has only been face and content validated. All of the simulators except SEP have shown educational impact. Feasibility and cost-effectiveness of simulation systems was not evaluated in any trial.Virtual reality simulators were shown to be effective training tools for junior trainees. Simulation training holds the greatest potential to be used as an adjunct to traditional training methods to equip the next generation of robotic surgeons with the skills required to operate safely. However, current simulation models have only been validated in small studies. There is no evidence to suggest one type of simulator provides more effective training than any other. More research is needed to validate simulated environments further and investigate the effectiveness of animal and cadaveric training in robotic surgery.

Read Previous Articles of the Week

Editorial: VR simulators can improve patient safety

February 20, 2013/7 Comments/by Roger Kirby

You wouldn’t expect the pilot of the aeroplane in which you fly to the EAU or AUA meeting to be a novice who was training on the aeroplane that you were being transported in! Similarly, patients undergoing robot-assisted surgery do not expect to be the “guinea pigs” upon which trainee surgeons move up the learning curve of surgical experience. Sometimes, however, they are.

Surgical simulators offer the means for surgeons to gain experience before moving to operating on actual patients. However, the publication from Guy’s and St Thomas’s illustrates how little research has been done yet to confirm that outcomes are improved by such a move.

Patient safety is a “buzz word” at present, especially after the report of Robert Francis QC on the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust disaster. It seems probable that virtual reality (VR) simulators can improve safety, not only by improving technical skills, but also by enhancing non-technical “human factor” responses.

Much work needs to be done to provide the VR training facilities and ensure access to them for all urology trainees. Once they are in place studies will be needed to confirm their value. In a world where doctors and Trusts are facing a tidal wave of litigation there seems little doubt that this is the way ahead.

Roger Kirby
The Prostate Centre, London W1G 8GT

Read the full article

Through My Father’s Eyes

February 2, 2013/4 Comments/by Timothy Averch

Growing up with a father who was a general surgeon, now retired, I was frequently exposed to the life and practice of a doctor. I witnessed a caring, compassionate physician rush off in the middle of the night to take out an appendix or manage a local trauma or an acute abdomen. What I was also witnessing was traditional and now, almost historic, medicine at its finest. The days of constant call, pay-for-service, and the prestige of medicine were in their hayday.

Since then, the transition to this current era has been dramatic. We’ve seen the evolution of evidence-based medicine, and more active involvement by the government within the practice of medicine, including governmental acts in healthcare laws to both protect patient’s privacy and to expand medical coverage for all. We’ve seen the reduction in residents’ hours leading to expectations of new practicing physicians to want to work less (and get paid more!). We are seeing hospitals purchasing practices by and the painful extinction of the private practitioner. There are more practice requirements, as well as restrictions, from both regulators and specialty societies. Accompanying this change has been the evolution and revolution of medical science that is slowly changing from what used to be significantly experiential and anecdotal to a more data-driven knowledge base in the formation of guidelines and best practice statements. This is going even further to include quality measurements that will not only improve outcomes but influence payment models and reimbursements. Additionally, the maturation of the Internet allows instant access to information: from being able to access everything from your pocket smart phone to the expansion of social media exemplified by the efforts of BJUI herein and the recent journal clubs conducted entirely on Twitter; technologies tying specialists together from all over the world.

Medicine has never just been about helping people, it is really about change: learning new science whether it be pathophysiology, medications or techniques. The ability for the practitioner to acclimatize to that change is how medicine has weathered the test of time. We adapt, we learn, and, ideally, we grow and become better doctors providing better care.

I recently had the pleasure of introducing my son, a high school student, to surgery just as my father had done with me (my first case was an appendectomy): he was able to observe a PCNL. Previously, if asked, he had disavowed any concept of pursuing medicine. Now, after seeing “cool” surgery that was like playing a video game, he is reconsidering. If he does enter into it, what will medicine look like in his time? How many more changes will occur going forward? How will we continue to evolve? Will he one day reflect upon medicine as it was through his father’s eyes? Time will tell…

Timothy D. Averch, MD, FACS is Professor and Vice Chair for Quality and Director of Endourology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre Department of Urology, Pittsburgh, USA.

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The X-Factor, Reality TV, and Live Surgery Demonstration

January 14, 2013/4 Comments/by Declan Murphy

My first suggestion to my wife was that I enter Pop Idol with my modified, radiation-bashing rendition of American Pie (chorus “bye bye brachytherapy seeds“). She quickly retorted “DIVORCE! YOU CANT SING!” I begrudgingly agreed. Then Britain’s Got Talent came along and I saw an overweight Greek father and son duo, Stavros Flatley, prance around the stage bare-chested, dancing to some traditional Greek music and I thought “YES! There is hope!” I put on Riverdance, grabbed my then three-year-old son and started teaching him the basics of an Irish jig. I pleaded with my wife to allow us enter the X Factor (or whatever reality TV show was auditioning at that time), but she again screamed “DIVORCE!”. It appeared my hopes of finding fame on reality TV were dashed forever (although I expect Masterchef might be interested in my prowess on the BBQ – Murphy’s Marvellous Marinade on a whole eye fillet deserves a wider audience).

At about that time, the vogue of having live surgery demonstrations featuring at clinical meetings was really gaining momentum. The World Robotic Symposium, European Robotic Urology Symposium, European Society for Urological Technology section meeting at the EAU, Challenges in Laparoscopy & Robotics and others, were all featuring live surgery demonstrations as a prominent part of their scientific program. These sessions feature enormous high-definition screens, 3D broadcast in some circumstances, parallel operating rooms, and live interaction with the surgical team, and have proved enormously popular with audiences and sponsors alike. In fact, without live surgery, some of these meetings would be quite dull –there is certainly a commercial value in featuring live surgery as part of the program as is demonstrated by the huge numbers attending these sessions. Whether it is the lure of seeing world-famous surgeons perform robotic prostatectomy, partial nephrectomy or various types of salvage surgery, or the ever-present possibility of seeing a complication and its management, there is a blood-lust which surgical audiences have for this type of entertainment, sorry – education, and which is being met by the organisers of urology conferences. A merry band of surgeon-entertainers roam the world turning up at these conferences with their entourage of assistants and scrub nurses, and turning on the charm for the huge audiences which the big names now attract.

However, some controversy surrounds the ethics and conduct of live surgery. We wrote in the BJUI previously about some concerns we had and questioning the absolute educational value of these demonstrations. Well known leaders such as Dr Arthur Smith have also voiced concerns about live surgery and in some specialties and some countries, live surgery demonstrations are banned. In response, it has been encouraging to see the European Robotic Urology Society (now an official Section of the EAU), whose annual meeting is a live surgery spectacular, work with others to generate guidelines and ethical standards for the conduct of live surgery at scientific meetings. These will be published in the coming months.

So when it dawned on me that the personal price to pay for fame on reality TV was too high, I resigned myself to a life away from the glamour and fame of reality TV. However, I was very interested when Alex Mottrie and Ben Challacombe invited me to do a live robotic radical prostatectomy for the European Robotic Urology Symposium in London a few months ago. I had only ever done live surgery demonstrations for quite small audiences previously (I had done my karaoke version of American Pie to bigger audiences), and I was somewhat daunted and excited by the prospect of doing live surgery for a big audience, especially one full of the “Gods of Robotic Surgery”. The reality TV star inside me was saying ‘YES! I AM GOING TO BE A STAR!!” So I said yes. And the nerves started soon after. By the time it got to the opening morning of ERUS (in stunning post-Olympics London), I was pretty anxious. The case was straight-forward and I had done hundreds already, so why was I nervous? Well the audience was big (>800), and they looked blood-thirsty – I could feel them licking their lips at the prospect of something going badly wrong. I knew that a few of the “good luck mate” wishes that I had received that morning could be interpreted as “I hope you don’t hurt your head when you fall off your pedestal”. And the big guys were all over the place. The live surgery roll included Vip Patel, Richard Gaston, Alex Mottrie, Prokar Dasgupta, James Porter, Ronney Abaza, Mike Stiefleman, Ashok Hemal and Peter Wiklund. Francesco Montorsi was in the operating room next door and we would be operating in parallel. It was somewhat daunting. Even the stars looked nervous before going live with their surgery, some were even quite temperamental as the stress builds, but when they go live to the convention centre, they put on their “TV-face” and the show begins – all sweetness and charm. Quite a show.

In the “Green Room” before live surgery at Guy’s Hospital in London for ERUS 2012: Ken Palmer, Geoff Coughlin, Jim Porter, Vip Patel, Declan Murphy, Francesco Montorsi and Declan Cahill

For me, I figured out that the reason I was nervous was that I did not want to make a mess of it in front of a big audience. Human nature has a vain streak to it, and much as I am embarrassed to admit it, I realised that some of my anxiety was just that – I wanted to look and sound good on the big screens. There – I’ve said it! Something certainly added a different stress to the normal pressure of wanting to do an excellent job for your patient, and I expect that even the highly experienced live surgery stars who feature at these meetings do feel this extra pressure. Especially when things get a little sticky or you cause some bleeding and someone at the other end is asking “why did you do that?” Thankfully my case went nicely and my patient has done very well – details to be presented at next year’s ERUS as part of their new guidelines which will see feedback from all cases from the previous Symposium – an excellent initiative.

Doing robotic radical prostatectomy at ERUS 2012

So for now, the reality TV star in me has been sated and life goes on. Although I did hear there may be a new reality TV series in Australia for amateurs who fancy themselves as crocodile hunters. I wonder would she let me do that….

Declan Murphy
@declangmurphy

Declan Murphy is Honorary Clinical Associate Professor at the Department of Surgery, University of Melbourne, St Vincent’s Hospital and Director of Robotic Surgery at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. He had previously been consultant urological surgeon at Guys & St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust in London.

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