Quality of supervision provided by anesthesiologists not linked to clinical productivity

Editor's Note

When anesthesiologists supervise anesthesia residents and nurse anesthetists, the amount of clinical work (total weekly hours) they perform does not positively correlate with the quality of the supervision they provide, this study finds.

The results suggest that anesthesiology department managers should be monitoring (and perhaps reporting) the quality of their departments’ level of supervision as well as establishing processes to educate individual anesthesiologists about quality supervision, the authors say. 

BACKGROUND: Although the clinical (operating room) production of individual anesthesiologists has been measured in multiple related ways (e.g., hours of direct clinical care), the same is not true for the quality of that effort. In our study, we consider the quality of clinical supervision provid...