SmashUrology · Reflections

What BAUS 2026 Taught Me About Where Urology Education Is Heading

By Mr Ibrahim Ibrahim, ST7 Urology Registrar & FRCS (Urol) · June 2026

I came back from BAUS 2026 with sore feet, a phone full of voice notes, and a clearer head about where the future of urology education is headed (PS SmashUrology will be a key part of it!).

This year the Annual Scientific Meeting returned to London for the first time in four decades, at the new International Convention Centre at Olympia. A few thousand of us — surgeons, trainees, nurses, researchers — under one roof for a few days. I wanted to write down what stayed with me while it's still fresh, partly because the FRCS Part 1 sits in two weeks, and some of this is relevant if you're in the final stretch.

Sponsoring the Residents' Bowl, and the Bell Clapper Trophy

We sponsored the BAUS Residents' Bowl this year, and the inaugural Bell Clapper Trophy.

For anyone outside urology reading this, the name is a little bit of specialty humour — the bell clapper deformity is the anatomical setup behind testicular torsion, and most of us have a vivid memory of our first 3am scrotal exploration. Naming a trainee academic trophy after it is exactly the kind of thing our specialty does - congrats to the BSoT team for delivering on this, particularly Mo Mubarak and John Hayes.

The Bowl itself is a rapid-fire knowledge competition between trainees, and standing there watching registrars fire back answers under pressure was a strange and good experience — because that recall, that calm-under-fire, is precisely what we try to train through the question bank and the viva room. Seeing it live, in a packed room was very exciting and I think we all loved it.

Sponsoring it was an opportunity to get engaged with trainees and see how they answer in real live pressure scenarios. Trainee education and improvement is at the heart of what SmashUrology is trying to do, and putting our name behind a trainee academic award felt like the most honest version of that.

The part I didn't realise was how much I'd talk and learn from just standing in the exhibition hall and talking to the people who actually use the platform and tools.

Meeting the people who actually use SmashUrology

I spend most of my time with SmashUrology looking at it from the inside — what to build next, what questions need rewriting and reviewed, what the data shows. At BAUS I got the other view. People came over and shared with me what works for them and what doesn't. Some of it was lovely to hear. Some of it was a list of things we need to fix, and those conversations were honestly the more useful ones. One thing that keeps standing out and we're continuously working on - people actually read the explanations and rely on them more so than the exam technique. Not my style of learning but that's the beauty of feedback.

One evening I had dinner with a group of trainees who use the platform. No stand, no pitch — just people a few weeks out from their exams, talking about how they actually revise, what they open between cases, what they ignore. I don't get this level of detail from analytics.

If you spoke to me at BAUS and gave me feedback: thank you. A fair amount of it is already on the list.

A walk through the exhibition hall

The exhibition hall at a meeting like this is its own world — robotics, imaging, devices, and the slightly surreal energy of over a thousand urologists in one space. Here's a quick walk through it.

The people you meet

The other thing about BAUS is the corridor conversations. I had the privilege of spending time with figures I've looked up to for years — among them Mo Belal, whose work and way of thinking about the specialty I admire enormously.

I still love seeing people face to face. As much as everyone thinks I'm all about the digital world (true to an extent), I still hugely value everything I learn from shaking hands and meeting inspiring figures and role models in urology. The committment to education and contribution to urology was something I have a newfound respect for.

I'm not gonna pretend I had super exchanges with everyone I met. But the cumulative effect of those conversations — over coffee, in the queue, between sessions — is that you leave with your thinking sharpened and your assumptions questioned. That's the real value of a meeting like this, and it doesn't show up in the programme.

Digital and education are no longer a side conversation

The clearest signal from the whole meeting: digital tools and education have moved from the sidelines to the centre of how BAUS thinks about the specialty's future. (In my view... about time!) AI in clinical practice was woven through the scientific programme rather than tucked into one small session. Trainee education ran as a serious theme, not an afterthought.

I'll be honest about my own bias here, because it's relevant: I'm building in this space, and I have a consultant role ahead of me with a digital remit, so of course I notice these threads. But I've sat through enough meetings where "digital" meant a single slide and a bunch of clueless clinicians about what digital actually means. The direction BAUS is signalling — accessible education, sensible adoption of technology, support for trainees — is the exact direction we set out to build in. It was reassuring to find we're very much heading in the same way.

Mr Ibrahim Ibrahim is a urology registrar (FRCS Urol) and the founder of SmashUrology. He writes about urology training, exams, and the slow, useful business of teaching the next set of surgeons.