Anesthesiology is a Special Specialty

Anesthesiology is a very precise discipline – you won’t see any “a broken clock is right twice a day” posters in their offices.  This is because anesthesiology is inherently dangerous for patients, as too little anesthesia can lead to an inhumanely painful experience for the patient, while too much can lead to an untimely death (hence the need for exemplary and impactful anesthesia CE).  One way that anesthesiologists were able to lower the number of accidental deaths was by standardizing the equipment they used and better education and instruction on how to use the machines.  The field of anesthesiology is always growing and one method that is starting to catch on is using Ideal Body Weight (IBW) instead of simply going by weight, in order to appropriately anesthetize patients.  Ideal Body Weight takes height, weight and sex into account.

Ideally, everyone would be using Ideal Body Weight in their calculations for dosages, but in order to get the IBW for patients, you need to obtain initial tidal volumes.  Although this is the recommended way of calculating dosage, it only has a 30% rate of compliance, which is absurdly poor for any profession.  This would be like going to a restaurant and finding out that only 30% of the food preparers washed their hands – as a customer, you’d expect close to 100% compliance.  Although this isn’t a perfect analogy, because worst case scenario, you get food poisoning at a restaurant, whereas worst case scenario, you could die from improper anesthesia dosage.  

Although continuing education does not always lead to the desired results, in this particular case, it would be beneficial for their to be more oversight over compliance with this type of CE.  For example, in Massachusetts, they made opioid CE mandatory and as a result, thousands of Massachusetts physicians have complied.  There currently are not many great CE resources on this particular topic, but below, we’ve posted some great CE offerings that we have found for anesthesiologists.  

Anesthesia CE

1.  Tidal Volumes during General Anesthesia: Size Does Matter!

2. Pharmacokinetics in Obese Patients

3. The Art and Science of Anesthesiology

4. Managing Acute Respiratory Failure