Led by Prof Prokar Dasgupta OBE, Professor of Surgery, King's Health Partners Academic Surgery unites the surgical and perioperative community across King's Health Partners, through a series of events and opportunities.

Vision and role

Our mission is to promote surgical excellence by harnessing our partnership’s collective strengths to enhance surgical research for the benefit of patients.

The programme aims to:

  • Facilitate outstanding surgical science collaborations;
  • Support hybrid surgical and implementation trials;
  • Inspire students aspiring to exciting surgical careers;
  • Improve education for the next generation of surgical trainees. 

"We want to facilitate outstanding surgical science collaborations; support hybrid surgical and implementation trials; improve education for the next generation of surgical trainees; and inspire students wishing to embark on exciting surgical careers."

- Prof Prokar Dasgupta

Areas of focus

Academic Surgery aims to drive surgical excellence across all specialties, improving education, training, access and networks for all of our students and surgeons. Here are some of our key activities:

Our innovative and dynamic lecture series is designed for practising surgeons, undergraduate and postgraduate trainees aspiring to be surgeons, and allied healthcare professionals who support surgical pathways of care. We focus on the latest themes in surgery, providing a framework in which the surgical and perioperative community can come together and network, develop friendships and relationships with national and international colleagues, present high-quality research, and share advancements in their specialist fields.

Celebrating pioneering surgeons through our Grand Round Professorships

As part of our Grand Round series each month, we celebrate equity, diversity and inclusion, and honour two prominent surgeons in history:

  • Sir Astley Paston Cooper, a renowned anatomist and surgeon operating in the late 1700s and early 1800s, recognised for his work at Guy’s Hospital which has a Dialysis Unit named after him. He was known in particular for vascular surgery, surgery for hernia, aneurysm, otology and serving as president for the Royal College of Surgeons.
  • Margaret Bulkley (Dr James Barry), a famed military surgeon in the same era, operating as Dr James Barry, who performed the first ever recorded and successful caesarean section. Bulkley-Barry was a pioneer both in their professional and personal life, as they lived as a man, but it was in fact discovered upon their death that they were female and had even given birth. We honour Bulkley-Barry as a pioneer.

We have therefore chosen to name this award as the Bulkley-Barry-Cooper ProfessorshipYou can read more about their fascinating life in our guest article by the esteemed author, Jeremy Dronfield.

Grand Rounds 2024

Grand Rounds are typically held virtually on the fourth Thursday of every month, from 5.30pm - 6.30pm. Please note that topics and dates are subject to change.

Details for each Grand Round event are confirmed closer to the time on our events page and below. You can also join our regular invite list to receive the latest event details by contacting kingshealthpartners@kcl.ac.uk.

Previous Grand Rounds can be accessed via the KHP Learning Hub.

Learn how to innovate, lead responsibly, and navigate change to transform your own clinical practice and leadership.

King’s Health Partners Academic Surgery is offering a full-year executive fellowship programme which aims to teach leadership as the process of implementing positive change in dynamic, volatile or complex environments.

As part of this programme fellows will study six original Harvard Business School cases and be registered with Harvard Business Publishing. This fellowship boasts a faculty with real-world med tech, entrepreneurship, and leadership expertise and offers a flexible course structure to suit full-time clinicians. 

The unique programme frames leadership through the perspective of four key domains:

  1. Risk and crisis management
  2. Innovation and entrepreneurship
  3. Diplomacy and people management
  4. Systems design and Culture creation

Find out more about the Executive Fellowship in Surgical Leadership.

Our Surgical and Interventional Challenges are a series of study days open to all medical and surgical clinicians, interventionalists, undergraduate and postgraduate engineering and medical students, and educators. Co-programmed with the King’s College London Department of Surgical & Interventional Engineering and hosted at the London Institute for Healthcare Engineering, these events aim to:

  • Create an interactive environment to share clinical experiences;
  • Facilitate balanced debates on current and emerging evidence;
  • Provide practical hands-on experience with current devices and techniques used for managing various conditions.

Previous study days have focused on Acute Pulmonary Embolism Management, Stomas, Mesh and Reconstruction in Hernia Repair, Implants in Orthopaedic Surgery, Training in Robotic Surgery, and Gastro-Oesophageal Reflux Disease. For further information and to receive updates on future workshops, visit the King’s College London webpage.

King's Health Partners Academic Surgery facilitates surgical excellence by harnessing our partnership’s collective strengths. This collaborative approach has enabled our colleagues to achieve outstanding results, as evidenced by the 2021 Research Excellence Framework. By working together, we continue to push the boundaries of surgical research, improving patient outcomes and advancing the field of surgery. Below are some of our achievements and ongoing projects.

The IDEAL framework for evaluating surgical robotics

King’s Health Partners colleagues have contributed to an important milestone in the advancement of surgical robotics research through their participation in the Idea, Development, Exploration, Assessment and Long-term monitoring (IDEAL) Robotics Colloquium. The recommendations published in Nature Medicine, provide practical guidance for evaluating surgical robots, structured according to the IDEAL stages, to support the assessment of a surgical robot throughout its life cycle.

Modelling kidney transplants using ex-vivo warm machine perfusion

Researchers successfully modeled antibody-mediated transplant rejection in human kidneys, potentially enabling the investigation of new mechanisms and testing treatment strategies for transplant rejection outside of the human body. The study, published in The Lancet eBioMedicine, was authored by post-doctoral researcher and transplant trainee, Pankaj Chandak and senior authors, Professors Anthony Dorling and Nizam Mamode alongside colleagues in the School of Immunology & Microbial Sciences at King’s College London, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust and King’s Health Partners.

King's Health Partners Academic Surgery has supported a number of pioneering surgical trials over the last few years. Read more below:

Colleagues across King's Health Partners have collaborated with the Old Operating Theatre to develop educational videos to encourage interest in surgery and medicine among young students and the general public.

In the video below, Mr Joydeep Sinha gives an insight into his role as Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon at King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

 

In this video - Prof Prokar Dasgupta, Professor of Surgery, King’s Health Partners, interviews Mr Arun Sahai, Head of Surgery, King's College London School of Medicine. They discuss Mr Sahai's plans for the School, working with the Academic Surgical Grand Rounds, and integrating with medical societies. 

Academic Surgical Grand Rounds

KHP Academic Surgery leadership

King's Health Partners Academic Surgery will be located at the MedTech Hub and Surgical and Interventional Engineering (SIE) at St Thomas' Hospital. Our team brings together a wealth of experience in surgery, including:

Prof Dasgupta has worked within our partner organisations for more than 20 years. He leads the outstanding robotic surgery programme at King’s College London and fosters strong surgical innovation and research partnerships with NHS partners locally and globally. Read more about Prof Prokar Dasgupta's career.

Prof Ashkan Keyoumars has a specialist interest in functional neurosurgery, image guided surgery and surgery for brain and spinal tumours. In addition to his clinical work, his is actively involved in research, especially in developing novel treatments for brain tumours and for Parkinson's disease. He is the deputy lead for neurosciences Research Advisory Group at King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, the President of the British Society for Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery, Chairman of the Surgical Group of the International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society, and Lead for the Genomics England programme for brain tumours.

Prof Bijan Modarai is the King's College London Chair in Vascular Surgery and a British Heart Foundation (BHF) Senior Clinical Research Fellow. He completed his Basic Surgical Training in London before being awarded a BHF Clinical PhD Studentship in 2002. He graduated with a PhD in Biochemistry in 2006 and completed his Higher Surgical Training as an NIHR Academic Clinical Lecturer at King's and as an Endovascular Fellow at The Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney. He was appointed as a Senior Lecturer in Vascular Surgery at King's College Hospital and Honorary Consultant Vascular Surgeon at GSTT in 2012, having secured a BHF Intermediate Clinical Research Fellowship.

Mr Joydeep Sinha is a Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon at King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, and Honorary Senior Lecturer, King’s College London. He has a specialist interest in Shoulder and Elbow surgery, particularly in the areas of arthroscopic “keyhole” shoulder and elbow surgery, shoulder replacement, sports injuries and upper limb trauma. He is also a Joint Clinical Academic Group Leader within King’s Health Partners, and working to develop and expand the King's Health Partners Department of Academic Surgery.

 A journey from surgeon to Chair of KHP

Prof Prokar Dasgupta speaks to The Rt. Hon Prof the Lord Ajay Kakkar PC, the Independent Chair of King's Health Partners.

They discuss Lord Kakkar's reasons for becoming a surgeon, his move into politics, and how he once had eyes on Prof Dasgupta’s role.