JScrusader,
actually "certification" has nothing to do with it. If you have an MD liscence, you can do whatever a hospital will give you privledges to do at their facility. In practice, board-certification or eligibility is often used by hospitals to set privledge status for procedures. For some procedures normally considered outside of your field or that have high morbidity, you may have to demonstrate a certain # of cases during your training or with proctored cases by other physicians. In urban areas, for a general surgeon to get privledges for advanced vascular or ERCP, you will have to show some arbitrary # for the procedure. This is the same reason why in say, cosmetic surgery- Dermatologists, Oral Surgeons, or ENT's may not be able to get privledges to do many cosmetic procedures. (This does not prevent them from doing it in their office or independent surgery center however, but a # of states are proposing legislation that would strongly curtail this after a spate of deaths under these circumstances).
I also find it very unusual in your example that an anesthesiologist would be able to cancel a case unilaterally b/c he felt a surgeon was "not certified". He could personally refuse to staff it, but assuming the surgeon was not denied privledges for it by the hospital credentialing committee, the decision to allow the procedure would not be his. For pete's sake..... there are already Cardiologists & Radiologists who go around doing some ridiculous non-indicated endovascular procedures & they worry that a boarded vascular surgeon can't operate on the aorta?
