ASC administrators and leaders continue to face a dire situation when it comes to anesthesia staffing.
Recent projections indicate that by 2036, the country will be short 6,300 anesthesiologists, and 56.9% of currently practicing anesthesiologists are already over age 55. The provider staffing shortage also extends to certified registered nurse anesthetists, who make up more than 80% of anesthesia providers in rural counties. By 2033, the U.S. is projected to face a shortage of about 12,500 CRNAs, nearly 22% of the current workforce. However, demand continues to remain high, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics projecting 38% growth in the field by 2032, making the CRNA one of the fastest-growing healthcare roles.
Chris Glover, MD, associate chief of anesthesiology at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, discussed his approach to hiring anesthesia professionals in an Oct. 16 panel at Becker’s 31st Annual Meeting: The Business and Operations of ASCs, which took place in Chicago.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: What strategies have you found most effective in retaining anesthesiologists and CRNAs, especially when burnout and lifestyle balance are top concerns?
Dr. Chris Glover: Money is not always the answer, that’s for sure. I think there’s a level of compensation that you have to address with regards to this younger generation. There seems to be a kind of a generational breakdown with regards to salary discussions and the rest, and so I think everybody’s kind of aware of what’s the new offer on the street. I can work every other Saturday, you know, for the year, and I can make half a million, or whatever that number is that they quote for us.
Scheduling flexibility is one [thing]. When you talk about long-term sustainable strategy, and how you retain folks when they’re burnt out, it’s giving them their why — and you try to build that into your culture, ensuring that there’s a call structure equity and a workforce equity, where everybody feels like there’s a there’s a collective pull when it comes to the work being done.
I think the breakdowns that you sometimes see with that is when one group in particular feels like they’re always in, say, the high-frequency turnover room and their [relative value unit] generation has a 20% variance compared to the rest of the group, but everybody’s salaried. When you think about that kind of process, putting productivity metrics up to make sure that everybody’s aligned with regards to some level of their compensation, has helped us to a degree.
And then when you talk about in the theater themselves, I think we’ve been really keen on ensuring that bookings, overbookings and the rest, we really try to constrain. And so for our surgical colleagues, when they post cases using CPT codes and the rest, there’s a trailing 10, which gives their average time. They can’t really modify that time to kind of adjust the block. And I think that kind of gives people a more reasonable expectation on when they’re going to be home. And I think that’s the other part of measuring that with regards to their expectation for us.