Dr Richard Grills

This is Talking Urology.

Joseph Ischia: I caught up with Richard Grills who is the Director of Urology at Barwon Health, and the winner of the AbbVie Platinum trophy award for research innovation. Richard, can you tell us about your research project?

Dr Richard Grills: Well, Joseph, we project where we looked at all of the flexible pyeloscopy cases done in Geelong over a two-and-a-half-year period. Fortunately, in Geelong we’ve gotten three hospitals and we’re able to capture all of the cases done at those three hospitals over two-and-a-half-year period by all of the surgeons. So, if there was a flexible pyeloscopy that happened in Geelong over the last two and a half years, we captured it in our data set. And we were looking at how often the scopes broke, how much it cost to fix them, and the durability, I guess, and whether there were any particular patient or surgeon-related factors that might, I mean, we cannot predict when you might break a scope.

Joseph Ischia: And what did you find?

Dr Richard Grills: We found that scopes do break and they break at about, where they need to be repaired or replaced, about every 13 years or so, 12.8 uses before damage occurs in some form, and we also looked at the cost of that and equated out to about $282 per case. If you average the total cost of instrument repairs and replacements over that two-and-a-half-year period of how many cases we did, almost 500 cases, it’s about $292 a case.

Joseph Ischia: What are the predictors, is it currency?

Dr Richard Grills: Unfortunately, you weren’t a registrar with us in Geelong during the study period, which might have altered the data a little bit, Joseph. No, interestingly, and in contrast to some other studies that have been done, we found that there were no actual predictors of when you could predict that the scope might break. So, one could often say that, you know, a big stone in the lower pole that that is a risk for the device breaking, but we didn’t actually find that there were any factors that we could attribute. So, it makes it difficult to say this is a case where you’re likely to break the scope.

Joseph Ischia: And where are you going to put your AbbVie Platinum trophy, is it next to Carlton’s last trophy coz that was a long time ago?

Dr Richard Grills: Well, it’ll go to the trophy cabinet at home, not a lot of room there, of course, Joseph. I’ll find a spot for it.

Joseph Ischia: Fantastic. Thanks, Richard.

Dr Richard Grills: Thanks, Joseph.