Urology

This service is based in Broadgreen Hospital. It provides general urological care to the local population, as well as specialist care to the population of Merseyside.

It is a large department with nine consultant urologists and five specialist nurses. There is a purpose-built urology centre at Broadgreen, containing all the outpatient facilities and the lithotripsy and a urodynamics suites. All planned surgery is provided at Broadgreen Hospital. Emergency care is provided at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital.

The Department is named after two Liverpool Urology pioneers, James Gow and Norman Gibbon.

Haematuria clinic

Haematuria is blood in the urine. We operate a one-stop clinic where patients are seen and undergo a number of investigations to determine the cause. These include:

• Ultrasound scan of the kidneys. This involves a sonographer carrying out a scan using jelly on your kidneys and bladder
• A flexible cystoscopy. This is an inspection of the bladder using a small camera which is placed inside. See Information leaflet
• Haematuria clinic information leaflet
  Flexible cystoscopy information leaflet

Lower Urinary Tract Symptoms (LUTS) Clinic

This is a clinic designed to assess people who are having difficulty with bladder symptoms. e.g. passing urine too frequently or too slowly. It will involve an examination and a Flow rate measurement

Urological Robotic Surgery

The Urology department at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital currently perform robotic prostatectomy for localised prostate cancer and robotic partial nephrectomy for kidney cancer. In addition to cancer surgery the robot is also used for complex minimally invasive procedures such as pyeloplasty for obstructed kidneys.

Introduction of robotic prostatectomy has resulted in shorter length of hospital stay with 9 out of 10 patients going home the day after surgery. Patients also tend to recover quicker, require less pain relief and have fewer complications. This surgery is not appropriate for all prostate cancer patients, however our unit is able to offer alternative treatment options such as radiotherapy, brachytherapy, hormone manipulation and chemotherapy.

Prostate cancer

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men in the UK. Over 40,000 men are diagnosed per year with this disease and there are now 250,000 men in the UK living with prostate cancer. Prostate cancer can affect men in very different ways. Some prostate cancers are very slow growing and may not affect a patient in their life-time, whereas other prostate cancers can be aggressive and require treatment.

Robin Weston consultant urological cancer surgeon performed the first robotic procedure in Merseyside in May 2011, and has performed over 100 robotic cancer cases in the first 12 months. 

Visit the Prostate Cancer UK website here

The da Vinci Si robot is the most advanced surgical robotic system in the world. It is essentially a surgical tool, which facilitates complex laparoscopic surgical procedures. The surgeon sits at a console in the corner of the operating theatre, viewing live 3-D images of the patient’s inner organs. The robot is positioned over the patient’s abdomen, deploying its telescope and instruments deep inside the body. Using hand and foot controls, the surgeon manipulates the camera system and miniature instruments deep inside the patient’s body, allowing extremely precise and delicate surgery to be performed through tiny incisions. The technical advantages of this system include 3-D vision, 10x magnification, tremor-filtering, and a much more advanced range of movements than possible with conventional laparoscopic surgery. More information on the surgery can be found here