Anesthesiologist as a perioperative physician, clinician, administrator, educator, and a researcher

Abstract

Anesthesia is an acute care specialty with a much wider scope in the current clinical practice. The addition of new clinical subspecialties puts additional pressure on already demanding workload with limited global anesthesia workforce. Doctors' burnout reports and currently exhausted doctors struggling with their clinical duties during COVID-19 pandemic are ample evidence of it. Due to COVID-19 crisis, a lot of subspecialty crossover care is provided by the anesthetists, and they have to work outside their normal clinical comfort zones. Anesthesiologists have been entrusted with the responsibilities of perioperative physicians in the last two decades. An anesthesiologist has to adopt several roles in a healthcare institution, including 'administrative', 'academic', 'clinical' and 'research' attributes. An ideal anesthesiologist is expected to have a fine blend of all of these traits, though the proportion of each will vary according to the work environment and the personal choices and preferences.