Dr Tevita Aho moved from New Zealand to the UK to be the Clinical Fellow in Uro-oncology at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (CUH) in 2003. The following year he was appointed as a Consultant Urological Surgeon.
During his training in NZ he spent a year learning Holmium Laser Enucleation of the Prostate (HoLEP) from the urologists who invented it. In 2004, Mr Aho introduced HoLEP at CUH where it rapidly became, and remains, the treatment of choice for the majority of men seeking a surgical treatment for urinary symptoms or retention. CUH was one of the first centres in the UK to offer HoLEP.
Mr Aho is the most experienced HoLEP surgeon in the UK, and has performed more than 1,700 procedures. He is frequently invited to lecture on HoLEP in the UK and abroad and has convened 13 annual HoLEP courses at CUH, where hundreds of delegates have learned how to perform HoLEP. He has demonstrated live laser prostate surgery (including the world’s first thulium laser enucleation of the prostate) on more than 25 occasions at conferences throughout the world.
He also has experience with other forms of benign prostate surgery including laser vaporisation and the minimally invasive urolift procedure. Mr Aho is the founding President of the UK Holmium User Group (HUG). He designed and implemented the national HUG Training Programme for HoLEP (a model which is now used internationally), and has mentored many surgeons in HoLEP. Mr Aho has been involved in HoLEP research from its earliest days, and has published and presented widely on the subject.