page_title: Ben Challacombe
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Ben Challacombe / Career
caption_attribution_description: Saint Thomas’ Hospital, London.
context_page_description: Benjamin James Challacombe FRCS is a British consultant urological surgeon at Guy's & St Thomas' Hospitals, London, who specialises in the treatment of kidney and prostatic disease using robotic surgery. In 2005, he was part of the team that published the results of a randomised controlled trial of human versus telerobotics in the field of urology and renal transplant, one of the first of its kind.
  After qualifying in medicine from Guy's and St Thomas' and completing junior surgical posts, he completed a da Vinci robotic Fellowship at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in 2009. In 2010, he was appointed consultant and pursued a surgical career in the procedure of removing part of a kidney using robotics and proceeded to regularly perform these, robotic radical prostatectomies and Holmium laser prostatectomies.
  In 2016, he performed the UK's first live broadcast of the robotic removal of part of a kidney. In 2019, he told his surgical story alongside that of Stephen Fry. In the same year he was awarded the British Association of Urological Surgeons Karl Storz Harold Hopkins Golden Telescope award.
context_section_description: Between August 1998 and January 1999, he completed general medicine house posts at Worthing Hospital in the specialties of cardiology, gastroenterology, and elderly care. Subsequently, he worked for six months in the specialty of urology at Guy's Hospital, followed by six months in accident and emergency at St Thomas' Hospital and then became anatomy demonstrator to professor Harold Ellis. From June 2000 to October 2002, he held a number of surgical posts at Guy's and St Thomas' including the specialties of breast surgery, endocrinology, colorectal surgery, orthopaedics and urology, before spending eighteen months as a research fellow in urology for Prokar Dasgupta and R. Tiptaft.
  In 2002, Challacombe began his masters in surgery at the University of London, gaining the degree in 2007 with a thesis titled “Telemedicine, Telerobotics and their Implications for Urology and Renal Transplantation”, a randomised controlled trial of human versus telerobotics, one of the first of its kind.
  In 2004, he gained a place on the surgical South Thames Training Scheme, which placed him at the William Harvey Hospital, the Kent and Sussex Hospital, and then at the Darent Valley Hospital. He gained his FRCS (Urology) in 2008.
caption: St Thomas' Hospital
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