Basically the future of anesthesia is the ACT (anesthesia care team) model. ACT is already something like >50% of all practices. It's the future and only growing. Groups are pressured to go ACT to keep up with demands for surgeries, etc. In the ACT model, attendings won't be doing most of their own cases. Instead attendings will be managing the ACT i.e. overseeing several CRNAs who do the cases, and putting out their fires.
Expect to take on the brunt of the legal liability.
Expect average ~60 hrs per week (some weeks more, some weeks less) as an attending in PP.
Expect most likely to be an employee, not a partner (e.g. employee of a hospital, of an AMC, of academia if you don't do PP).
Expect to be treated as second rate by hospitals and even fellow physicians or surgeons i.e. colleagues (mainly because anesthesiologists don't have their own patients and so don't bring in money to the hospital but are more considered a necessary expense to get surgery done, so hospital admin and other physicians don't have to cater to you or refer to you or anything like that, and patients usually don't know who you are, let alone consider you "their doctor"; so for example, surgeon is late for a case, surgeon wants to add-on a case at the end of the day when you're about to go home and have dinner with the family, surgeon prefers to do a case on Saturday, guess who gets to stay late or come in on the weekend! You do'nt really have as much bargaining power with the hospital or your employer to say no, and be careful about cancelling too many cases and getting hospital admin or surgeons upset!).
Expect salaries to be around $300k though (unless most of your patients are all Medicare, or you live in an area with really poor payor mix, in which case your salary could be much lower -- and remember as the anesthesiologist you don't directly control or choose your patients like a surgeon does, so you can't just say, I won't do this case because they dont have insurance that reimburses fairly, you just take whatever you're given by the surgeon/hospital).
If you're happy with all that, then anesthesia is good. Otherwise, best to look elsewhere.
