Personal Statement
Mr Ben Eddy is a Consultant Urological Surgeon with a specialist interest in Urological Cancer Surgery with particular interest in Laparoscopic and Robotic surgery, he is one of the UK’s most experienced robotic prostate cancer surgeons.
Summary
Ben was appointed at East Kent Hospitals Trust in 2010 following Consultancy in Southmead Hospital in Bristol and prior Robotic Fellowship training in Australia. He now has over 10 years experience of Consultant practice in the UK and has become one of the UK’s highest volume and most experienced Robotic Prostate surgeons with a national reputation in the field of robotic surgery.
Ben is a family man married to Ali with 3 children at school locally in the Canterbury area, he is a keen cyclist, skier and rugby enthusiast.
Robotic surgery specialist
Ben trained at Guy’s and St Thomas’ medicals schools and did his Specialist Registrar training in the South Thames training region. In 2008 he went to Adelaide, Australia to complete an international Robotic Fellowship in one of Australia’s highest volume centres.
He was one of the first UK Registrars to do this type of robotic surgical training and his appointment in East Kent was with the specific task of setting up the Robotic Surgical service for the trust. He introduced the service with the highest level of governance and safety, introducing new practices such as nurse robotic assistants, a consistent high volume surgical approach, high levels of outcome data collection and reporting all of which has led to a service that has one of the shortest hospital stays and lowest complication rates for robotic prostate surgery in the country.
He has now performed around 1400 Robotic Prostatectomy operations and has presented the results of his own series of over 1000 consecutive robotic prostate operations both nationally and internationally, something no other UK surgeon has done and only a handful of international surgeons have achieved. He has also developed robotic kidney cancer surgery and complex robotic ureteric reconstructive surgery for the department.
National trainer in robotic surgery
Ben has also played a key role in training. He is a national trainer in robotic surgery, one of only a handful selected by Intuitive Surgical, and has trained over 30 Consultants in departments around the country, including his own. He has established East Kent as a “Urology Foundation Centre for Robotic surgical Training”, one of only 5 centres in the UK. He has developed an international fellowship program for training in robotic surgery and has international Urological trainees learning from him over 1 year. He is a senior lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University and has talked at many national and international conferences. He is an active researcher having been involved in many trials and has presented and published widely in the area of robotic surgery and Uro-oncology. He is cancer lead for the department and Prostate Cancer lead for the Kent and Medway Cancer Alliance.
Achievements
In 2017 Ben was awarded the prestigious John Anderson national award by the British Association of Urological Surgeons for the quality of this service. This had not been previously awarded to a UK prostate cancer robotic surgeon.
Ben has also been very involved with The Urology Foundation, the UK’s only Urological charity and was the recipient of the TUF Robotic team preceptorship program in 2012. This provided funding to help train his robotic theatre team. As a result he has been very active in raising funds for the charity and over the last 7 years his annual bike rides have now raised over a quarter of a million pounds for them, this money has gone back into vital Urological research and further robotic surgical training.
Ben is a member of British Association of Urological Surgeons, Royal College of Surgeons England, European Association of Urology, American Urological Association, Royal Society of Medicine, General Medical Council and British Medical Association.