Dr Ben Challacombe

Ben Challacombe: Hello, my name is Ben Challacombe, I’m a consultant urologist from Guy’s Hospital in London and I’m also a secretary of the British Urology Association Section of Oncology. I’ve just presented some data on the BAUS National Prostatectomy Audit looking at the outcomes of radical prostatectomy across the whole country over the last five to six years. What we specifically showed was that the volume of operations done by any individual surgeon has gone up dramatically from a level of around 10 three years ago to an average volume of over 39 in the current audit. At the same time, a number of procedures performed by an individual center have gone up from around 40 to a number that is now approaching 95. This means that we have had quite effective centralization of our radical prostatectomy service over the last few years and this is probably partly due to the availability of robotic surgery within the cancer centers. Other interesting points were that the rates of transfusion seemed to be less than 1% now, the rates of major complication are also around 1% and the average length of stay for the country is a median of one day for the minimally invasive techniques. We then spoke about how this data has been used in terms of getting surgeons who are outliers to either adapt their service or to give up operating and referral to other colleagues and how using a rather softer rather than heavy-handed approach has enabled BAUS to do this quite effectively without upsetting people over the last few years. Thank you.