"Most CRNAs hold a doctorate", said Joseph Rodriguez, spokesperson for American Association of Nurse Anesthesiologists (AANA).
“It is immoral to hold professionals back from providing excellent patient care."
Morality ceases to become an issue when it comes to lying, I guess....
Talk about disingenuous. Joe ignores their own history and actual facts.
There are still thousands of CRNAs in clinical practice who have a nursing diploma (not a degree) and a nurse anesthesia certificate.
Community hospital nurse anesthesia programs granting nurse anesthesia certificates (not a degree) were quite common well into the 90's, often from the same nursing school that granted their nursing diploma. There was no requirement for "critical care nursing" experience (which I seem to recall that even to this day can be defined by individual programs) and many CRNAs went straight from their diploma program into the nurse anesthesia program. These programs often existed to feed their own hospitals with a steady supply of new-grad CRNAs every year. Graduates of those programs are likely in their mid-50s or later at this point.
Nurse anesthesia programs didn't require a bachelors degree for admission until 1986 and still for many years didn't grant a graduate degree, just a certificate.
The granting of a masters degree in nurse anesthesia wasn't required until 1998. Contrast that to the Emory AA program which was a master's degree from day one in 1971.
The requirement for a DNP as the entry level into nurse anesthesia doesn't actually take effect until 2025, although many are already up and running. There are quite a few master's to DNP bridge programs, usually done as an online setup. Of course that's helpful since one has to have doctorate-level faculty to offer a doctorate-level degree. No problem - just educate them yourself. There is no requirement or even attempt to offer additional clinical training in the bridge or most full length DNP programs. They are however plenty of QI, statistics, healthcare policy, nursing "ethics", yada, yada, yada, and of course intense graduate level coursework in CRNA politics.
Interestingly (and quite predictably) applications to the full length DNP programs has waned, as the length of the program is now 3 years, which means an additional year of tuition at a doctorate-degree granting university. More tuition = more student loans and three years of NOT working as nursing salaries go through the roof due to supply and demand economics. It's not higher math to figure out the time to recoup lost income plus tuition/student loans can be decades.