sleep medicine?

[residency2010]

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any anesthesia resident be interested in sleep medicine here? any thoughts on practising both on OR and Sleep medicine? any body out here actually doing sleep?

 

[michigangirl]

We have 2 sleep boarded anesthesiologists in my institution (took the boards through the new certification process for anesthesiologists). I do sleep research, but more EEGs in intubated kids receiving tons of sedatives, not OSA/peri-op stuff like my colleagues. So I decided to forgo another set of boards since I'm only interested in kids who are critically ill and don't want to go through training to learn how to interpret outpatient adult PSGs.

The colleagues who are sleep trained do airway work under anesthesia and are interested primarily in peri-op management of OSA.

 

[residency2010]

Thanks for the reply. Do u guys think 1 yr of sleep fellowship actually adds to income potential of ansthesiologists? are there jobs out there where people do mix of anesthesia and sleep?

 

[manowar rules]

This is an old thread but I wanted to bump this given my own interest in sleep medicine and the potential expanding scope of anesthesia practice.

Are there any anesthesia folk who work in sleep medicine or plan to practice in sleep? I do think it is an untapped field that we can add to with our expertise in airway, pharmacology, and respiratory physiology.

 

[kazuma]

If you're thinking PP, I would think you'd run into similar problems as with CCM in terms of scheduling time out of the OR to staff a sleep clinic. Unless you took a part time OR gig and had enough sleep business to keep you busy.

 

[Sirach38]

I know a few sleep docs that do gas as well. They are all in academics. Not sure if this is a possible set up in PP like kazuma said.

 

[Depakote]

The only person I know that's done a sleep fellowship went into PP and wound up doing OR full-time. I would imagine there is a way to split your time, but it's going to be tough to find a place (or combo of places) looking for that specific skill-set and is willing to let you split your time between each.

 

[RMortis]

Seems like it would be financially sound, we all meet people with undiagnosed OSA, skip over consulting pulm and have your own sleep clinic, book everyone for one or two days and read the psg once or twice a week in the mornings. Management of their disorders might be a problem if they have complex pulmonary issues that require a pulmonologist

 

[michigangirl]

RMortis is spot on. It could be a very good model, to be the point person within your institution for peri-op OSA consults. Operationally, though it's harder than it seems. If someone gets newly diagnosed peri-operatively in your clinic, are you going to keep them as patients long-term? What about all of their comorbidities? This is why the adult pulm-sleep docs work so well. But if your institution is willing to staff/fund a periop OSA clinic to optimize outcomes/prevent catastrophes, it could work, then you send them to adult pulm-sleep when done with periop care.

Other option is to split your time equally between OR and sleep clinic. As long as the anesthesia folks give you the time and flexibility to go do your clinic, attend sleep conferences, etc. Gotta keep up with both specialties and reading PSGs, prescribing sleep meds in the outpatient setting is a very different bear than doing combinations of Anes-CCM for example, where there is a lot more cross talk.