"Fact CRNA's have been around since the late 1800's."
Wrong. Maybe he means "Nurse Anesthetists." The FACT is CRNAs have only been around since 1945 and the schools of nurse anesthesia have only been certified since 1952. So I would say that "fact" is off by about 50 years."
FACT: The MDAs and CRNAs are not graduating enough of their respective members to keep up with demand. The AANA itself has admitted the CRNA programs are graduating 1000 too few CRNAS to meet current demand.
FACT: The Baby Boomers are starting to retire and over the next 5-15 years, 1/3rd of the current CRNAs are going to retire. The AANA has no plans on how to handle that.
FACT: The American population is aging, further increasing demands for anesthesia providers. Again, the AANA has no plans regarding that.
FACT: The number of nurses being graduated is not keeping up with demand. Fewer nurses means fewer potential applications for CRNA programs.
FACT: To be a CRNA you must first be a BACHELORS degree nurse. Yet today, even after years of the bachelor degree being the recommended entry level for nurses, less than half of the current practicing nurses had a bachelors degree. That means the POOL that the CRNA programs can draw from is less than HALF of all the nurses practicing, on top of the nursing shortage.
FACT: To further restrict potential candidates, the AANA insists all the nurses have 1-2 years of critical care experience.
FACT: When all gets said and done, there is a nursing shortage, it is getting worse and of those who are out there practicing, less than 20% have the qualifications to even get into a CRNA program.
FACT: Every CRNA that comes out increases the shortage for general duty nurses. It "improves" on situation by making another worse.
FACT: An AA can come from a wide variety of programs. Since the AAs can come from a wide variety of backgrounds, training someone to be an AA will not cause a shortage in some other field of medicine or nursing.
FACT: The Military realized this years ago. They shut down most of their nurse practitioner programs and went with Physician Assistants. They realized every time they took a nurse off the ward and made them an ANP, they lost a nurse on the ward. The AA issue is the same.
FACT: Training more CRNAs increases the NURSING shortage. A CRNA will not work on the ward when they are not busy, they go home. Training AAs rather than CRNAs will keep more nurses on the wards where they are needed.
And I say all of this after 35 years as a nurse, 33 years as a nurse anesthetist and 20 years in the USAF.
It is not a johnny come lately issue but rather a means of fixing a problem that was ironically created by the CRNAs themselves.
