Ben Challacombe

Laproscopic Surgery Robot

As a surgical trainee in 2009, he was awarded the Rowan Nicks UK and Ireland Scholarship from the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons. He focussed on the da Vinci robotics with professor Anthony J. Costello at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia. Later in 2009, he returned to The Royal Marsden Hospital under professor Christopher Woodhouse.[1][6][7]

In 2010, he was appointed to Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital, shortly before being also appointed as surgeon at the Prostate Centre, London,[8][9] and pursued a surgical career in the procedure of removing part of a kidney using robotics and proceeded to regularly perform these. He has since also regularly performed robotic radical prostatectomies and Holmium laser (HoLEP) prostatectomies. Other robotic surgery he has been involved in include nephroureterectomy, pyeloplasty and adrenalectomy. He teaches robotics and HoLEP and runs the robotic fellowship programme at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust and teaches at the British and European Annual Urology meetings.[7][10][11] In this respect, he has encouraged his students to spend some time playing wii.[12]

In 2016, as part of "world robotic surgery education", he performed the first live broadcast of a robotic partial nephrectomy in the UK,[13] while listening to music. This helped him manage his time and track his surgical procedure by giving crucial auditory cues, reporting that "you basically have a maximum 30-minute window to remove a cancerous tumour from a kidney. The traditional way is for someone to call out the time, but that's distracting and quite stressful. With the music, I know where I am without that".[14]

In this live webcast, he used a playlist comprising Coldplay's "Viva la Vida" and "Princess of China", followed by "So Far Away" by Dire Straits and then "Burn" by Ellie Goulding and "Just Give Me a Reason" by Pink. The sixth and last song on the playlist was "Stop Crying Your Heart Out" by Oasis, the onset of which would have indicated that time was over: "I don't ever want hear the Oasis song", he reported.[15][16][17]

Since 2018, he has increasingly taken over the work of prostate surgeon Roger Kirby.[8] In 2019, Challacombe told his surgical story of treating prostate cancer alongside the same story told by his patient, actor and author Stephen Fry.[18] It was published in Nature Reviews Urology in an article titled "Both sides of the scalpel: the patient and the surgeon view".[6][19][20]

In 2020, he was interviewed by his cousin Rupert Cox, on testicular cancer and the treatment of England and British Lions rugby player Alex Corbisiero.[21] During the COVID-19 pandemic in London, he described his robot as having been furloughed, eventually returning to work when the one tonne machine was transferred from Guy's to an adjacent private facility where surgery could recommence.[22]

• Challacombe, Ben; Patriciu, Alexandru; Glass, Jonathan; Aron, Monish; Jarrett, Tom; Kim, Fernando; Pinto, Peter; Stoianovici, Dan; Smeeton, Nigel; Tiptaft, Richard; Kavoussi, Louis (January 2005). "A randomized controlled trial of human versus robotic and telerobotic access to the kidney as the first step in percutaneous nephrolithotomy". Computer Aided Surgery. 10 (3): 165–171. doi:10.3109/10929080500229561. ISSN 1092-9088.
• Murphy, Declan G.; Challacombe, Ben J.; Elhage, Oussama; O'Brien, Tim S.; Rimington, Peter; Khan, Mohammad Shamim; Dasgupta, Prokar (1 September 2008). "Robotic-assisted Laparoscopic Radical Cystectomy with Extracorporeal Urinary Diversion: Initial Experience". European Urology. 54 (3): 570–580. doi:10.1016/j.eururo.2008.04.011. ISSN 0302-2838.
• Fry, Stephen; Challacombe, Ben (March 2019). "Both sides of the scalpel: the patient and the surgeon view". Nature Reviews Urology. 16 (3): 153–158. doi:10.1038/s41585-019-0153-y. ISSN 1759-4820.

• The Big Prostate. Springer, London, 2017. ISBN 9783319647043 (Co-editor)
• The Management of Small Renal Masses: Diagnosis and Management. Springer, 2018. ISBN 9783319656564 (Co-editor)