Laparoscopy in urology practice at a tertiary care centre

To describe the results of laparoscopic procedures at a Urology - Nephrology tertiary care centre.

Case series / observational study.

The Kidney Centre Postgraduate Training Institute, Karachi, from August 2007 to March 2012.

Medical records of all planned laparoscopic surgery conducted during the study period were reviewed. Those cases which to open surgery were excluded. All were performed by a single surgeon, initially as supervised and later independently. Data was maintained for demographic data, procedure details, length of hospital stay, and complications including conversion to open surgeries. Data was analyzed through SPSS 17.0.

There were 36 planned laparoscopic surgeries in the specified period. Out of 36 cases, 8 were converted to open surgery. Those who underwent laparoscopic surgery include two diagnostic procedures and renal cyst deroofing each, four ureterolithotomy, nineteen simple nephrectomy and one radical nephrectomy. So in total 28 cases were performed on 15 females and 13 males with mean age of 33.01 ± 10.9 years. The mean operative time was 216 ± 100 minutes and mean length of hospital stay was as 2.7 ± 1.04 days. There were 10 complications in 28 cases, majority being Clavien Grade II including 7% (2/28) blood transfusion.

There are technical challenges in learning laparoscopy for practicing urologists. Following some learning model in a systematic manner will help surmounting the technical challenges in learning laparoscopy.