Author’s Note: This is the text of the Leffingwell Honorary Lecture delivered at the annual meeting of the California Society of Anesthesiologists on April 9, 2022. Slides are available on request.

It is truly an honor to be here, and I want to thank Dr. Ronald Pearl and the California Society of Anesthesiologists for your kind invitation to speak.  I was quite surprised to receive it.  I’m neither a department chair nor an eminent researcher.  I find the concept of being a “thought leader” or an “influencer” frankly horrifying. Physicians aren’t sheep, and we don’t need to be led to think.

What I am is a well-trained writer. I owe that to my college professors and my editors at the Wall Street Journal, who were pitiless with their red pencils and equally quick to point out poor writing, or sloppy thinking, or both.

Since I never wanted to become a department chair, or a politician, or ASA President, I haven’t hesitated to say what I think about the sad state of healthcare – or really, anything else. I mean, if no one disagrees with you, have you said anything worth hearing?

Alexandr Solzenitsyn was right: “Truth seldom is pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter.” You may not agree with some or any of the ideas I’m going to talk about today, but if that’s the case, I hope you’ll be inspired to come up with better ones! I’m going to zero in on some of the hard truths about our profession and offer some thoughts about what we can and perhaps should do going forward.

Now I’ve never for a moment regretted becoming a doctor. I wanted to be a doctor since I was a kid and read a book my father gave me, published in 1960, called “All About Great Medical Discoveries.”  It had a horrifying and yet fascinating chapter about how terrible surgery was before anesthesia was invented, and how anesthesia made modern surgery possible.

In the 40 years – yes, 40 years — since I graduated from medical school, I’ve never regretted going into anesthesiology. It’s a wonderful field. We have the honor of being with patients and safeguarding them through some of the most critical moments in their lives.

There are amazing young people entering our field, I’m happy to say, so from that point of view, the future is promising.  In this year’s match, I believe there was only ONE unfilled position. But there are storms and riptides threatening our profession, and that is why we need – urgently – to rethink, redesign, and reimagine the practice of anesthesiology.

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This article, with advice for residents about the future of anesthesiology, was published first in the October 2020 issue of Anesthesiology News

You may be weary of being told that our profession is facing a time of unprecedented threat – from third-party payers, from the government, from non-physician practitioners. You’ve heard it so often that your brain is tuning it out. Is the threat level exaggerated for dramatic effect? Is it better just to go on with your day and not think about it at all?

That would be a mistake. The real question is:  How should we deal with the upcoming “market adjustment” that almost certainly will result in lower anesthesiologist compensation? In the face of gloomy reality checks, how can we promote pride in our profession and recruit the best medical students? How can we continue research that will reduce risk and improve outcomes? How do we avoid becoming irrelevant or extinct, like Kodak, Xerox, Sears, and now Hertz? It’s time to face the future.

The threats are real

Unfortunately, the “unprecedented threat” claim is all too real. Department chairs everywhere  worry that they will not be able to maintain the compensation rates that anesthesiologists have enjoyed up to now. Why?

The Medicare Trust Fund is expected to become insolvent as soon as 2024. The chair of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), Michael Chernew, PhD, recently commented, “We are very dedicated to finding payment models to promote efficient delivery of care.” No one could possibly think this will mean anything other than lower payments to physicians.

Scope-of-practice expansion is gaining ground. On March 30, CMS issued an array of “temporary” waivers and new rules, waiving the requirement that a nurse anesthetist must work under the supervision of a physician. How likely are these new rules to be reversed under a new administration, whether Republican or Democratic? Whether or not you live in an “opt-out” state may not matter in the near future.

Hospitals were in trouble even before the COVID-19 pandemic. Many have gone bankrupt; others are merging with larger health systems. At present, around 80% of hospitals subsidize their anesthesiology departments to the tune of millions of dollars each year. Realistically, can these subsidies continue? Probably not. Will hospital administrators seriously consider cheaper staffing models for delivering anesthesia care? Probably yes.

Make yourself indispensable

First, it would be wise to assume that a downward “market adjustment” to anesthesiologist compensation is coming. Plan for it now. Stop yourself from spending to the full extent of your income, and put away all you can in a tax-deferred retirement account.

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The Institute of Medicine in 2010 famously recommended that nurses should be encouraged to practice “to the full extent of their education and training.” Often, you’ll hear people advocate that every healthcare worker should “practice at the top of their license.”

What this concept is supposed to mean, I think, is that anyone with clinical skills should use them effectively and not spend time on tasks that can be done by someone with fewer skills, presumably at lower cost.

So I would like to know, please, when I’ll get to practice at the top of my license?

As a physician who specializes in anesthesiology at a big-city medical center, I take care of critically ill patients all the time. Yet I spend a lot of time performing tasks that could be done by someone with far less training.

Though I’m no industrial engineer, I did an informal “workflow analysis” on my activities the other morning before my first patient entered the operating room to have surgery.

I arrived in the operating room at 6:45 a.m., which many non-medical people wouldn’t consider a civilized hour, but I had a lot to do before we could begin surgery at 7:15.

First, I looked around for a suction canister, attached it to the anesthesia machine, and hooked up suction tubing. This is a very important piece of equipment, as it may be necessary to suction secretions from a patient’s airway. It should take only moments to set up a functioning suction canister, but if one isn’t available in the operating room, you have to leave the room and scrounge for it elsewhere in a storage cabinet or case cart. This isn’t an activity that requires an MD degree. An eight-year-old child could do it competently after being shown once.

(Just for fun, I sent an email one day to the head of environmental services at my hospital, asking if the cleaning crew could attach a new suction canister to the anesthesia machine after they remove the dirty one from the previous case. The answer was no. His reasoning was that this would delay the workflow of the cleaning crew.)

Then I checked the circuit on the anesthesia machine, assembled syringes and needles, and drew up medications for the case. To each syringe, I attached a stick-on label with the name of the medication, and wrote by hand on each label the date, the time, and my initials. These tasks, as you might guess, don’t require an MD degree either. A pharmacy can issue pre-filled syringes, and clever machines can generate labels with automatic date and time stamps.

It was now 7 a.m., and I moved on to the preoperative area to meet my first patient. I introduced myself, and started to interview her. Then I noticed that no one had started her IV yet. I asked the patient’s nurse if he would set up the IV fluid, which had already been ordered via the electronic medical record. “If I have time,” he replied.

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