Thunder Bay Urologists Training the World Through Fellowships

Thunder Bay has become a centre of world-class urology care in a very short time. In fact, Thunder Bay is one of a handful of centres for certain prostate and kidney stone procedures. These include holmium laser enucleation of the prostate (HoLEP) to treat benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) and kidney stone treatments with the holmium MOSES laser and a trilogy lithotriptor.

All three treatments offer advancements that can greatly reduce side effects, the risk of side effects, and recovery time during their respective procedures.

However, the waitlist for patients from outside of Thunder Bay for these procedures is growing. That’s why Dr. Hazem Elmansy, program director, and Dr. Walid Shahrour are taking time from their busy schedules to train other urologists in these techniques through NOSM’s first fellowship program.

“We are overbooked with fellowships until 2026,” Dr. Elmansy said. “Our last fellow was from Saskatchewan. On the first day, he saw procedures he’d never seen before.”

Although training obviously takes time up front, it pays dividends down the road. Dr. Elmansy’s vision is to train as many other urologists as possible on these procedures so that more urology patients across Canada can get these vastly superior treatments sooner.

“We are interviewing many urologists, because we need this technology across Canada as well,” Dr. Elmansy said. “My goal is that we will take one Canadian and one international fellow at a time.”

The team in Thunder Bay takes a holistic approach to training these fellows. “We don’t graduate clinical fellows as clinicians only,” he said. “We graduate them as clinicians, as researchers, and as leaders.”

That way, Dr. Elmansy said, they can go out into their own practices and advance new techniques with their own research.

You can help grow our world-class urology program! The Urology Fund at the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Foundation helps ensure we can maintain and upgrade the cutting-edge technology we have here. Your donation today will impact thousands of patients in Northwestern Ontario with a range of urological conditions using treatments not always available elsewhere. Please visit healthsciencesfoundation.ca/donate or call our Donation Centre at (807) 345-4673. Thank you!