Nonoperating room anesthesia cases are expected to account for more than 50% of all anesthesia cases in the next decade, according to a report by the American Hospital Association and the American Society of Anesthesiologists.
As the demand for anesthesia services continues to shift outside of the hospital setting and into ASCs, physicians’ offices and other outpatient sites, the anesthesia workforce will need to adapt to differences between inpatient and outpatient anesthesia care.
Allyn Wilcock, CRNA, owner of Snoqualmie, Wash.-based Advanced Anesthesia Services and Northwest Healing and Wellness, joined Becker’s to discuss the ways that he thinks incoming anesthesia providers can be more prepared for outpatient work.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length:
Question: As the demand for non-operating room anesthesia continues to grow, how can the anesthesia workforce be more prepared for work in outpatient settings?
Allyn Wilcock: As far as the skills and what is needed to be prepared for kind of non-operating room anesthesia and outpatient services, it’s just that level of decision-making and independence that comes with time and with practice. [It’s] the ability to make difficult decisions on the fly that maybe new grads or younger ASC providers aren’t used to making. I think now, with AI and other resources that are going to be coming along, that’ll be easier and they will have more resources to help make those decisions. But knowing what’s appropriate in those outpatient areas from an anesthetic standpoint versus what should be brought into the main operating room is a hard decision for newer people who don’t have the experience to make sometimes.
Q: What changes could be made on a larger scale to prepare the workforce for a migration of procedures to ASCs and similar settings?
AW: It seems like most of the training programs are centered around hospital training and even hospital-based ASCs, as opposed to freestanding, independent ASCs. Including those ASCs into training programs where residents would rotate through smaller, maybe more rural, freestanding, not hospital-affiliated, surgery centers would probably help prepare them a lot more. It’s getting used to not having the resources of a big hospital system. A lot of people who are training in hospital systems and are training in surgery centers that are attached to those systems, they still have a lot of the resources that come with the larger organizations, whereas smaller facilities don’t have those resources. If we could expand training programs into some of these more independent programs, it would probably give people more exposure to help them.
