From Royal to BHQ: 8 Years of Practicing Urology in Cambodia — A Personal Journey

마지막 업데이트: 4월 30, 2026

Medically written & reviewed by Dr. Soarawee Weerasopone (Dr. Pom)
Last Updated: April 2026

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The Question I Get Asked Most

“Why Cambodia? Why not stay in Thailand or go straight to a private hospital in Bangkok?”

For eight years, this was the question my friends, colleagues, and even some patients kept asking me. And honestly, for a long time, I struggled to answer it well — because the real answer wasn’t a single sentence. It was a journey.

In April 2024, I was invited by Bangkok Hospital Headquarters (BHQ) MSO Training to share that journey as a CME lecture. The title was “From Royal Hospital to BHQ: 8 Years of Precious Urology Experience at BDMS Cambodia.” Standing in that auditorium — the same hospital where I was, as it turns out, born in 1984 — I finally had a chance to put the whole story together.

This blog post is that story. It’s about how a newly graduated urologist with no roadmap ended up pioneering several “firsts” in Cambodian urology, training in Taiwan and Japan, and eventually being recruited to Bangkok Hospital Headquarters. But more than that, it’s about what eight years of working in a developing healthcare market taught me — lessons I think any young doctor, or anyone building something from scratch, might find useful.

Setting the Scene: Urology in Cambodia

Before I tell my story, you need to understand the landscape.

Cambodia, as of today, has roughly 120 Khmer urologists for a population of over 16 million. The country’s three big government hospitals — Calmette, Khmer-Soviet Friendship, and Preah Kossamak — together produce about 10 new urologists per year. For comparison, that’s a tiny fraction of what Thailand graduates annually.

The private healthcare market in Cambodia is sharply divided:

• Upper-class Cambodians and expatriates typically fly to Bangkok or Singapore for serious medical care. Bangkok Hospital, Bumrungrad, Phyathai, Mount Elizabeth — these are the names they trust.
• Middle and lower-class patients rely on government hospitals or local clinics, some of which still operate out of converted shophouses.

That left a narrow but interesting gap in the middle: international-standard private hospitals located inside Cambodia, serving patients who couldn’t or wouldn’t travel. That’s where Royal Bangkok Hospital — part of the BDMS network — came in.

There are two BDMS hospitals in Cambodia:

• 로열 프놈펜 병원 — 100 beds, 14 ICU beds, 5 operating rooms, JCI-accredited, and a BDMS Center of Excellence. Officially opened in November 2014 with Cambodia’s then-Prime Minister Hun Sen attending the ceremony.
• 로얄 앙코르 인터내셔널 병원 — 32 beds, 7 ICU beds, 2 operating rooms, located in Siem Reap. This was actually BDMS’s first hospital in Indochina, opened back in 2006.

When I arrived in 2016, both hospitals existed. But the urology service? That was a different story.

October 2016: The “Weekend Urologist”

I graduated from my urology residency at King Chulalongkorn Memorial Hospital in 2016. Like every Thai medical graduate, I had a government service obligation to fulfill. But I’d also seen a job posting for a part-time Thai urologist at Royal Phnom Penh, and on a whim, I applied.

I was hired as a weekend urologist. I’d fly into Phnom Penh on Saturday morning, see patients Saturday and Sunday, and fly back to Bangkok Sunday night. I did this so often I qualified for Bangkok Airways Premier Plus status — which honestly says more about how often I was on planes than about how busy the clinic was.

When I started, the urology setup at Royal Phnom Penh was, to put it mildly, very limited:

• One part-time Khmer urology professor who came in on-call from a government hospital, bringing his own instruments
• A monopolar endoscopic transurethral surgery setup borrowed from elsewhere
• No flexible scopes, no lithotripsy, no laser
• A waiting room where patients literally had to wait until the doctor drove in

There were three of us Thai urologists rotating on weekends. Within months, two of them resigned. The math just didn’t work — we’d often see zero patients in a day, and even when we did, we couldn’t actually treat them. A patient with a ureteric stone? All we could offer was medical expulsive therapy and prayer.

By early 2018, I was the last Thai urologist standing. Home Alone, basically.

Mid-2017: The Turning Point

The single most important thing that happened during this period had nothing to do with me.

In mid-2017, Dr. Narintara Boonjongcharoen (Arjan Narintara) became the new Hospital Director of Royal Phnom Penh. I noticed the change almost immediately — equipment requests that had been pending for a year started moving. Within months, we received a ureteroscope and lithoclast (a pneumatic stone fragmentation device).

It sounds small. It wasn’t. For the first time, I could actually treat an emergency ureteric stone obstruction. After a year of feeling like I was practicing medicine with my hands tied, I had a tool. One tool. But it was something.

The lesson here was bigger than the equipment: leadership matters. Without a director who understood what a urology service actually needs and was willing to push procurement through, none of what came later would have happened.

2018: The Game Changer — 4th Generation ESWL

In mid-2018, Arjan Narintara approached me with an idea that, frankly, sounded too ambitious for our setup: install a 4th-generation Extracorporeal Shockwave Lithotripsy (ESWL) machine from Taiwan.

To put this in context: at the time, even most hospitals in Thailand were still using 3rd-generation ESWL. The 4th-generation machine had a built-in real-time ultrasound feeding into an AI tracking system developed by the Taiwanese manufacturer. The theory was simple — when you breathe, your kidney moves with your diaphragm. Older machines couldn’t compensate, so reported targeting accuracy was around 82%. The new machine pushed that to 98%, meaning fewer wasted shocks and less unnecessary tissue damage.

The catch: it cost twice as much as a 3rd-gen machine and couldn’t be moved (no mobile-truck service like in Thailand). The deal Royal Phnom Penh struck was elegant — the Taiwanese company supplied the equipment, the hospital provided the certified treatment room, and we shared the profits.

Because the machine required real-time monitoring during every session, the director’s requirement was that a urologist had to be physically present for every case. So in 2018, I flew to Taiwan for a 5-day intensive training at Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, Linkou branch — and that single trip changed the trajectory of my career.

In October 2018, we performed Royal Phnom Penh’s first-ever ESWL case. In November, we held a national kidney stone seminar that was covered by Cambodian TV news. By January 2019, the Urological Association of Asia (UAA) — whose Secretary General, Professor Allen Chiu, was Taiwanese — chose Royal Phnom Penh as the venue for an Asian School of Urology Educational Symposium. The Dean of Chiang Mai University Faculty of Medicine, Professor Bannakij Lojanapiwat, attended as a Thai faculty.

In his August 2019 Asian Urology journal report, Professor Chiu wrote a line that has stuck with me ever since:

“If I go alone I go fast, but if we go together we go far.”

That symposium opened a door I didn’t know existed.

2019: Going Full-Time, Going International

Two months after the ESWL symposium, CGMH Linkou offered me a 3-month observing clinical fellowship in Robotic Urology — working with the da Vinci surgical system. CGMH is the largest hospital network in Taiwan with over 10,000 beds across seven branches; the Linkou branch alone has nearly 4,000 beds and was one of the earliest adopters of robotic surgery in Asia, having installed its first da Vinci in 2006.

I trained under Professor Yu and got to know Professor Pang, the Deputy Director of CGMH and himself a urologist. The schedule was packed — different operating rooms with different professors every morning, robotic simulator sessions every evening after work, and conferences on Saturdays.

By June 2019, I’d seen enough. I converted to full-time urologist at Royal Phnom Penh, and I was given a new mandate: open a urology service at Royal Angkor International Hospital in Siem Reap as well.

The first urology seminar at Royal Angkor — and crucially, the second one, held two weeks later alongside Dr. Damrongpan Watanachote, then Director of the Urology Center at Bangkok Hospital HQ — drew overflow crowds. Cambodian TV news covered both events. For the first time, the Royal Angkor urology service had a face and a story attached to it.

That same year:

• July 2019 — selected as one of 16 Asia-Pacific young urologists for the AUSTEG-AUA hands-on laparoscopic workshop. Met Professor Maxwell Meng, head of Minimally Invasive Urology at UCSF, and started discussing a possible US fellowship.
• August 2019 — held a Japanese-language urology seminar in Phnom Penh, targeting the roughly 2,000 Japanese expatriates living in Cambodia. This is where I first met Mr. Matsushita Hironori, then Director of Sunrise Hospital (the Japanese hospital in Phnom Penh).
• October 2019 — second CGMH fellowship, this time in Andrology at the Kaohsiung branch, mentored by Professor Wang and Professor Po-Hui Chiang. Professor Chiang published the seminal 1991 paper that established color Doppler ultrasound as the standard diagnostic tool for erectile dysfunction — a technique still used in clinics worldwide today.
• 2019년 11월 — first 60W Holmium laser installed at Royal Phnom Penh, the first such laser in Cambodia. This finally gave us a serious tool for both stone disease and BPH (enlarged prostate).
• 2019년 11월 — invited as international faculty at the 2019 Cambodian Urological Society meeting (a recurring honor I’d receive every year afterwards).

2020-2021: COVID, and a Strange Kind of Golden Age

January 2020 — international faculty at the 3rd Asian Urological Oncology Forum in Kaohsiung. Things were going well. My UCSF training was on the calendar.

Then COVID hit.

I’ll never forget standing at Phnom Penh airport in March 2020, watching the departure board fill up with red CANCELLED notices in real time. My UCSF fellowship was put on indefinite hold. I went home to Bangkok and spent two months on leave without pay, cooking on the floor of my apartment.

But here’s the strange thing: COVID, for all its devastation, created what I now think of as the golden age of the Royal Phnom Penh urology clinic.

Why? Because Cambodian patients couldn’t fly out anymore. The wealthy patients who used to go to Bangkok or Singapore for care suddenly had to stay home. And we were one of the few international-standard urology services they could access without leaving the country.

When borders cautiously reopened in June 2020, getting back to Phnom Penh became a 18-hour ordeal — van from BHQ at 5 AM, three hours stuck at the Poipet border crossing waiting for stamps, then a long drive on Cambodia’s two-lane highways where dogs, cows, and children could appear in front of you at any time. I’d arrive at Royal Phnom Penh around 11 PM. And the next morning, I’d start work at 8 AM.

For two years, my routine was:

• Six days a week of clinic, often running until 7 PM or later
• Monthly road trips to Royal Angkor (about 6 hours each way) to maintain the Siem Reap service
• Every return to Thailand meant 28 days of quarantine (14 each way) — and leave without pay each time

I stayed in Cambodia. I learned digital marketing — Google, Facebook, Instagram, LINE OA, Telegram, WhatsApp, WeChat — anything to keep in touch with patients. I started doing tele-urology consultations between Phnom Penh and Siem Reap to extend coverage without spending three days on the road.

In February 2021, we got our first flexible ureterorenoscope, which made RIRS (Retrograde Intrarenal Surgery) possible for stones not suitable for ESWL. In September 2021, we opened Cambodia’s first dedicated Men’s Health Clinic, anchored around Penile ESWT (Extracorporeal Shockwave Therapy for erectile dysfunction).

By the end of 2021, the urology department I’d inherited as a one-instrument-and-a-prayer operation in 2016 was running real, modern, multi-modality care.

2022-2023: Continuing to Build

After borders fully reopened, I went back to school — again.

• September 2022 — one-month Endourology observing clinical fellowship at Juntendo University Hospital, Tokyo, under Professor Shigeo Horie.
• August 2022 — attended the first-ever REZUM case at BHQ in Bangkok, planning ahead for what I wanted to bring to Cambodia.
• July 2023 — held the first Cambodian seminars on REZUM Water Vapor Therapy for BPH, with strong support from Dr. Niwat Inthrawichian, the new Royal Phnom Penh director.
• 2023년 9월 — selected as a Young Asia Urologist for the UAA Young Urology Leadership Forum in Dubai.
• October 2023 — performed Cambodia’s first REZUM case, making Royal Phnom Penh the country’s pioneer in minimally invasive BPH treatment.

After five years, our 4th-generation ESWL service had treated over 200 patients.

A Highlight Case: The Elephant Attack

If you ask me which case best captures what working at Royal Phnom Penh actually means, it’s not one of the technically complex robotic cases. It’s an elephant.

A Malaysian veterinarian working with an NGO that protects Cambodia’s wild elephants was charged after an anesthetic dart failed to take effect. The elephant’s tusk struck him in the right flank, causing a liver injury and Grade 4 kidney injury.

The hospital’s helicopter ambulance system — something we’d built but never tested under this kind of pressure — flew him in from the field. Trauma surgery, hepatobiliary surgery, urology, ICU, anesthesia, radiology, blood bank — everyone converged. Multiple disciplines, one patient, decisions in real time.

He walked out of the hospital alive.

That case made the international newspapers. But what I remember about it isn’t the press coverage. It’s what it told me about the team we’d built: that on the day it really mattered, every department worked. The systems worked. The training paid off.

What Eight Years Taught Me

If I had to compress eight years into a few honest lessons, here’s what I’d say.

1. “Be ready and be kind.” This is my actual takeaway slide from the BHQ lecture, and I mean it literally. Be ready — keep training, keep learning, keep your hands sharp — because you don’t know when the door will open. Be kind, because the people you meet on the way up are also the people you’ll meet on the way through.

2. The blue ocean isn’t easy. Friends used to tell me, “Cambodia must be easy compared to Thailand — it’s a blue ocean.” It wasn’t. The competitors are BHQ itself, plus Bumrungrad, Phyathai, Mount Elizabeth, and a dozen Bangkok hospitals — the wealthy patients in Phnom Penh don’t compare you to local clinics, they compare you to the best hospitals in the region. You have to earn the right to even be considered.

3. Mentors are everything. Arjan Narintara, who pushed through procurement and built the marketing engine. Arjan Damrongpan, who connected me to the broader Bangkok urology community. The CGMH professors who opened doors in Taiwan. Professor Allen Chiu, whose UAA platform put a brand-new Cambodian urology service onto the Asian map. None of this was solo work.

4. Leadership decides what’s possible. The same hospital, with the same staff, but a different director, was a different hospital. When Arjan Narintara arrived, things that had been “stuck for budget reasons” started moving within weeks.

5. Crisis can be opportunity. COVID was awful in every imaginable way. It was also the period during which the Royal Phnom Penh urology clinic finally got the patient volume to validate everything we’d built.

Why I’m Now at BHQ

In 2024, I was offered the chance to join Bangkok Hospital Headquarters as a full-time urologist specializing in robotic surgery, men’s health, and testosterone replacement therapy. After eight years in Cambodia, and with a family to think about, I accepted.

There’s a personal coda to this. When I was preparing the BHQ lecture, my parents reminded me of something I’d half-forgotten: I was born at Bangkok Hospital Headquarters on August 2, 1984. The pediatrician who delivered me was Dr. Premruedee. The room had a broken air conditioner. My parents told me they never imagined I’d one day come back to work in the building where I was born.

In a way, the eight years in Cambodia were the long way home.

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자주 묻는 질문

Q: Where did Dr. Pom train as a urologist?

A: Dr. Soarawee Weerasopone (Dr. Pom) completed his urology residency at King Chulalongkorn Memorial Hospital in 2016. He has since completed international fellowships at Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, Taiwan (2019, robotic urology and andrology), Juntendo University Hospital, Japan (2022, endourology), and Baylor College of Medicine, USA (2026, men’s health and TRT).

Q: What hospitals did Dr. Pom work at in Cambodia?

A: Dr. Pom worked at the two BDMS hospitals in Cambodia — Royal Phnom Penh Hospital (a 100-bed JCI-accredited Center of Excellence in the capital) and Royal Angkor International Hospital (a 32-bed hospital in Siem Reap). He served as a part-time weekend urologist from October 2016 and converted to full-time in June 2019.

Q: What was the first 4th-generation ESWL machine in Cambodia?

A: Royal Phnom Penh installed Cambodia’s first 4th-generation ESWL (Extracorporeal Shockwave Lithotripsy) machine from Taiwan in October 2018. The technology was actually more advanced than what was available in most Thai hospitals at the time, with built-in real-time ultrasound and AI-driven targeting that improved shockwave accuracy from approximately 82% to 98%.

Q: When did Cambodia get its first Men’s Health Clinic?

A: Royal Phnom Penh opened Cambodia’s first dedicated Men’s Health Clinic in September 2021, anchored around Penile ESWT (Extracorporeal Shockwave Therapy) for erectile dysfunction. Dr. Pom led the development of the service.

Q: When was the first REZUM (Water Vapor Therapy) procedure performed in Cambodia?

A: Cambodia’s first REZUM Water Vapor Therapy procedure for benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) was performed by Dr. Pom at Royal Phnom Penh in October 2023. REZUM is a minimally invasive treatment that uses targeted steam to reduce prostate volume, preserving sexual and urinary function.

Q: Where does Dr. Pom currently practice?

A: Dr. Pom currently practices at Bangkok Hospital Headquarters (BHQ) in Bangkok, Thailand, specializing in robotic and minimally invasive urological surgery, men’s health, and testosterone replacement therapy. He maintains professional connections with the BDMS Cambodia hospitals and continues to support Cambodian urology training through international faculty roles.

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Have a question about urology, men’s health, or TRT? You can book a consultation with Dr. Pom at Bangkok Hospital Headquarters.