Posted by stanley on August 6, 2009, 10:35 am, in reply to "Re: The Future???"
The shortage of anesthesia providers is real, the shortage has abated somewhat with the economic downturn, whether this change is temporary or not time will tell, CRNA graduation has doubled in the last 5 years and new programs are opening every day, in addition more and more people are entering nursing every day as jobs disappear and the medical field is the most stable employer out there, the bottleneck is in training new nurses nurse educators get paid crap.
The AA would be a viable option except for its total domination by the ASA, the care team model as it stands (4-1) ratio has no science behind it, there is some evidence that a team model increases the safety somewhat,(extra hands) but the ratios in which this effective are unknown and the extra hands do not have to be an MD. A situation in which 20% of your assets may or may not be used is not effective particularly in a time of escalating costs and decreased revenues. The fight between the ASA and the AANA is in the end about who controls the money for anesthesia, AA's are one means the ASA wishes to maintain its control. I could be far more supportive of AA's if the organization were not so blatantly subservient and at the mercy of the ASA. Like all of health care the current system is unsustainable the AA is just a way of maintaining the status quo with a different provider.
