Article About CRNA Supervision

MEDICAL ANESTHESIOLOGISTS KEEP CRNA SUPERVISION RULES INTACT - Anesthesia Progress Blog

Here is just one paragraph from the link provided above. Apparently *I* am not the only one who is confused about what the law says, even though the law is very clear! I have added italics and boldface type because I like to.

The anesthesiologists countered with the American Medical Association’s recently passed resolution that agreed with the official policy statement of the ASA that “anesthesia is the practice of medicine.” Therefore, nurses providing anesthesia without physician supervision could be viewed as practicing medicine with neither medical training nor a medical license. They even surveyed groups of surgeons and Medicare-insured senior citizens to see if they would be comfortable having a nurse anesthetist, who may be without a college degree and who may have had only a couple of years of nurse anesthesia schooling, to be entirely responsible for the anesthetic or whether they preferred a physician who had graduated from 4 years of college, 4 years of medical school, and 4 years of rigorous internship and residency in anesthesia. It is no surprise that the results from the seniors indicated a preference for the anesthesiologists, whereas the surgeons preferred anesthesiologists for all but ASA I patients. The anesthesiologists also lobbied for a national survey to be conducted to determine whether anesthetics given solely by CRNAs were as safe as those given by anesthesiologists.