Progress report for the Yayasan Tun Suffian Scholarship
By :
Dr. AZHAR BIN AMIR HAMZAH,
International Fellow Specialist Urologist
Urology Department, Fiona Stanley Hospital,
Murdoch Drive, Western Australia, 6150 Australia
MBBS(Mal), MMed (General Surgery), AM (Surgery), MRCS (Edin)
FRCS (UROL)(Glasgow), FICS (USA), Malaysian Board Certified Urologist(MBU),
FADUSM, Fellowship in Uro-Oncology and General Urology ( Western Australia),
Certified Medical Independent Assessor CMIA (NIOSH),
It has been almost nine months I have stayed and worked in Australia as part of my urology fellowship and sub-speciality training in Uro Oncology, Minimally Invasive and Transplant. I have been very grateful to Allah SWT the Most Merciful , with His Blessings – my training journey has been rather smooth here without much problems.
I am attached to the one of the best world renowned Uro-Oncological centers in Australia – called the Fiona Stanley Hospital in Murdoch, Western Australia. It caters the highest number of Urological cancer patients in the whole of Australia and currently is the referral and tertiary centre. It harbours the best, most expensive and most sophisticated medical equipment and facilities including robot guided devices. It is merged with the State Rehabilitation Centre (SRC) and has its own 2 billion worth Medical Research Institute called the Harry Perkins Medical Research Institute. Fiona Stanley Hospital has been the Australian government ‘baby project’ in terms of striving to be the cancer medical centre benchmark at an international level.
At this hospital I am given a post as a International Fellow Specialist Urologist. I am allowed to operate as much as possible without much restriction according to the local medical practice. I have been very busy operating many urological cancer cases- laparoscopically and conventionally and have been undergoing lots of training and exposure of various type of cases and surgeries, some which I have seen way back home in Malaysia ; and some are totally new for me.
Besides the surgeries I am exposed to the Australian medical practice called as the Multi-Diciplinary approach meetings (MDT)- whereby every cancer patients who has been recently diagnosed will be discussed in a MDT meeting attended by the Urologist , Pathologist, Radiologist, Medical Oncologist, Radiation Oncologist and relevant clinician Specialists. The discussion will go through the patient’s profile, best options of treatment and what is the best for the patient that suits his profile. That has been totally a new practice for me and I will definitely imply that once I come back to Malaysia.
Another interesting practice here is that the profile of the patient is highly linked and computerized. Every single data about the patient is accessible via the computerized system called as “Bossnet’- meaning that a patient could be coming from a very remote hospital in North Australia, but all his data including his previous and recent most blood results , lab reports, radiological imaging etc are all linked throughout all the hospitals in the country. That is an excellent achievement and need to be brought back implemented in Malaysia.
In terms of training, my head of department is Profesor Dickon Haynes- who is the world renowned expert in bladder cancer . He is an excellent mentor surgeon in treatment of bladder cancer and I have been working and operating together with him in almost all his cases. Besides that, I am also attached to Dr Akhlil Hamid and Dr Matthew Brown who are experts in laparoscopic and Minimally Invasive surgeries. Dr Isaac has been mentoring me on Kidney cancer surgeries and I have been working closely with Dr Michail Lozinsky for my prostate cancer work. My transplant gurus are Dr Andrew Tan (who has a Malaysian background) and Dr Bhandari. They are great surgeons and respectful mentors.
Tun Suffian Scholarship Program has definitely helped me to ease a lot of burden financially and I am very thankful to board of members of Yayasan Tun Suffian Scholarship Program, for giving me this opportunity. I am very proud to be one of the Tun Suffian Scholar and hopefully I can share and cherish other fellow Malaysians as well.
Dr Azhar bin Amir Hamzah
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