The history of modern anesthesia over the past 160 years begins with nurses assisting surgeons in the use of ether and then other gases. Anesthetics became increasingly more complex, from approximately the 1920s on. Surgical patients became sicker. Anesthesia outcomes initially worsened. These trends led to specially trained physicians – anesthesiologists – assuming responsibility for providing and directing anesthesia care, as well as performing the increasingly complex medical procedures associated with the perioperative care of surgical patients.
Indisputably, the nature of anesthetic practice as well as of surgery, have changed tremendously in the last two centuries, bringing with them dramatic changes in the necessary body of knowledge and skills. Medical training and medical research have transformed surgery and anesthesia into complex and inseparable medical disciplines. The answer to the first question – has the body of knowledge and skills necessary to care for patients changed – is a clear-cut “yes.”
Nurse anesthetists have continued to administer anesthetic medications and monitor many patients during surgery. Other nurses perform somewhat analogous monitoring tasks in intensive care units and procedure rooms. But a nurse anesthetist’s functions of administering medication on physician order, although it resembles what nurses routinely do, takes place in a very different and far riskier setting than its non-surgical counterpart. Treating it as akin to the bedside administration of medication in a medical-surgical ward, as some do, ignores these substantial differences. Moreover, actually administering medication is only a small part of the necessary functions included within the practice of anesthesia. There should be little doubt that ordering the panoply of medications used in providing anesthesia care and responding to developments arising in surgery lie far outside the normal scope of nursing practice.