All inpatient urology services are provided at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital, with one of two designated Urology Cancer Centres in the Mersey region. 

The service provides prostate, bladder, kidney and testis cancer specialist MDT’s delivering all aspects of pelvic and abdominal surgery, including reconstructive surgery. 

The service also has the only permanent lithotripter in the region and delivers all aspects of endoscopic and percutaneous stone management. 

Excellent support is provided by the Interventional Radiology Department and there is CT and MRI availability at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital and Aintree University Hospital. Nuclear medicine facilities are also available on the Royal Liverpool University Hospital. The department provides tertiary service for robotic nephron-sparing surgery, robotic and laparoscopic nephroureterectomy, RFA and cryoablation, nephrectomy with caval involvement and RPLND. 

The main Urology ward at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital (Ward 5B) is a state of the art all single rooms. It includes a Urology Assessment Unit for emergency cases with a waiting room and assessment area. There is also an enhanced recovery unit. 

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Patients will be referred into this service by their GP. This will be on either an urgent or routine referral. This referral will be triaged by the team and assigned to the appropriate clinical team for your care. 

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 stomach to observe the kidneys and bladder.
  • A flexible cystoscopy. This is an inspection of the bladder using a small camera which is placed inside.
  • Haematuria clinic
  • Flexible cystoscopy.

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.

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 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.

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.