Minimal access surgery has reshaped surgical practice, offering reduced pain, faster recovery, and improved outcomes — when applied thoughtfully. This episode explores the principles underpinning laparoscopic and minimally invasive techniques, focusing on ergonomics, visual-spatial adaptation, instrumentation, and patient safety.

We discuss indications, contraindications, learning curves, and complication profiles, alongside the cultural shift required to adopt new approaches without abandoning surgical judgement. The episode also reflects on how technology influences decision-making — and where restraint remains essential.

This chapter equips listeners to understand minimal access surgery not as a default choice, but as a tool to be selected, mastered, and respected.

Endoscopy has transformed the way surgeons diagnose, monitor, and treat gastrointestinal disease. This episode explores the principles, indications, and limitations of upper and lower GI endoscopy, framing the procedure as both a diagnostic and therapeutic tool.

We examine patient selection, consent, preparation, and complication avoidance, alongside interpretation of findings and integration with surgical pathways. The episode also reflects on the expanding role of endoscopy in surveillance, early cancer detection, and minimally invasive intervention.

Rather than focusing solely on technique, this chapter teaches clinicians how endoscopy fits into broader decision-making — clarifying when it answers questions, and when it raises new ones.

Modern surgery is inseparable from imaging. This episode explores the principles behind diagnostic imaging — from plain radiography to CT, MRI, ultrasound, and interventional techniques — focusing not on physics alone, but on clinical reasoning.

We discuss how to choose the right investigation at the right time, how to interpret images in context, and how imaging shapes surgical planning, risk assessment, and patient counselling. The episode also addresses limitations, incidental findings, and the dangers of over-investigation.

By emphasising interpretation rather than technology, this chapter trains clinicians to treat imaging as an extension of examination — not a replacement for it.

Before technology, before subspecialisation, and before complex decision-making, surgery begins with skill. This episode focuses on the fundamental techniques that underpin all surgical practice — tissue handling, haemostasis, suturing, knot-tying, and respect for anatomy.

We explore why technical errors often stem not from lack of knowledge but from poor fundamentals, fatigue, or loss of situational awareness. The episode also examines how skills are learned, practised, and maintained — from simulation to supervision — and why deliberate practice matters more than repetition.

This chapter reminds listeners that excellence in surgery is built quietly, through mastery of basics that protect tissues, preserve function, and prevent complications.

Surgery does not exist in a vacuum, and nowhere is this more apparent than in tropical infections and infestations. This episode explores conditions that remain common globally but are often unfamiliar in high-income settings — including parasitic infections, mycobacterial disease, and tropical causes of abscesses, ulcers, and obstruction.

We examine how…

Despite advances in technique and technology, infection remains a central threat to surgical outcomes. This episode examines how surgical infections arise, how host defences interact with microbial behaviour, and why timing and source control are often more important than antibiotic choice alone.

We explore principles of asepsis, perioperative prophylaxi…

Surgery has traditionally relied on removal, repair, and reconstruction. This episode explores how tissue engineering and regenerative therapies are expanding those boundaries. We examine the principles behind scaffold design, stem cell biology, growth factor signalling, and bioengineered tissues — and how these technologies aim to restore form and func…

Wound healing is one of surgery’s most fundamental processes — and one of its most frequent points of failure. In this episode, we explore the biological stages of healing, from haemostasis and inflammation through proliferation and remodelling, translating cellular mechanisms into clinical reality.

We discuss why wounds heal differently depending on tis…

Shock represents one of the most time-critical states in surgery, where physiology, pattern recognition, and decisive action intersect. In this episode, we examine the mechanisms of shock with particular emphasis on haemorrhage — the leading preventable cause of death in trauma and major surgery. We explore how circulatory failure develops, how the body…

Every surgical intervention, from minor incision to major trauma, provokes a coordinated metabolic response designed to preserve life. In this episode, we explore how the body responds to injury through neuroendocrine activation, inflammatory signalling, and shifts in energy metabolism. We unpack the hormonal drivers of the stress response — including c…