Anesthesiology has wild swings. Decent paying jobs were hard to come by about 8 years ago, now they are lots of jobs. But sooner or later the market will saturate again (due to a huge number of anesthesia grads) there are about 1100 residents and another 1400 CRNAs coming out each year for the next few years. Will there be enough room in the market for them? Only time will tell. Surgical volume has peaked in the US at around 25 million anesthetics per year. The number of retiring anesthesiologist has declined due to the hot job market and the down stock market.
The hot anesthesia market is NOT an indication of increased surgical demand, but low anesthetist supply. This issue will be resolved in the next couple of cycles.
No one can predict these issues. But you can look at the numbers and make an educated guess. There are about 30,000 MDAs in the US and I believe about 60,000 CRNAs. What you want is the retiring number of anesthesiolgists per year to be equal or greater than the number of grads (about 1100 per year) to have a good job market, while maintaining an equal number of sugrical cases.
Will this happen? No one knows. You must choose a career based on what you would like to do for FREE, and hope everything else works out well. That is, do what you like and pray for the best.
The only concern I would have would be surgical volume. It has leveled off after about 10 years of 10% plus growth. Where will it be in the next 10 years? That is the golden question I would be asking.
