AANA – Anesthesia Guidebook

What up yall! This is a quick shout out to those of you headed to the AANA conference this weekend, August 2nd, 2024 in San Diego.

I hope that yall have an incredible time and meet tons of new colleagues, see old friends and have fun gettin’ your learn on.

I was talking to one of the SRNAs from the University of New England this morning in clinical and she’s was getting psyched for the conference this weekend. AANA Annual Congress is one of those times where you can kind of lift your head up from the daily grind and look around & see thousands of other CRNAs & SRNAs or RRNAs from around the nation who are all out there doing their thing in anesthesia. It’s such an inspiring time!

While I will NOT be there reppin’ Anesthesia Guidebook, my clinical team from Maine Medical Center and MaineHealth will be.

So first, why am I not putting up a booth and talking about Anesthesia Guidebook… first & foremost, I’m not trying to sell you something. Anesthesia Guidebook is still anchored in the concept of free open access medical education. There’s no subscription fee and I’m not trying to make money off of CE credits. There’s a hundred other ways out there for you to make Class A credit and that just hasn’t become a professional focus on mine. Which brings up the reminder that any anesthesia related podcast you listen to will qualify for free Class B credit in the CPC program. If you’re a CRNA and you routinely listen to anesthesia podcasts, all you have to do is self-report your credits to the AANA and you’ll rack up those Class B credits super fast.

I actually did a brief podcast on this topic way back in Episode #9 of the podcast if you want to hear more about how to do that.

So while there’s no Anesthesia Guidebook table at AANA Annual Congress, you CAN go meet my good friends and colleagues from Maine Medical Center in the exhibition hall. April Bourgoin, Jill Guzzardo and Danielle Beaumont will be there staffing the MaineHealth booth to tell yall about the amazing career opportunities within MaineHealth. We have everything from level 1 trauma center work with my team at Maine Medical Center where I serve as chief CRNA to a full independent practice location in Conway, NH to several other smaller town medical centers throughout Maine, including Pen Bay Medical Center in Rockland, where Jill is the chief CRNA.

So April Bourgoin will be out there this weekend. Dr April Bourgoin one of our CRNA Supervisors at MMC, and she’s been on the show before talking about OR fires back in episode 93. I actually just recorded an episode that I’m editing now with April and our CRNA Manager, Alison Kent, on how we do interviews as a leadership team at MMC. That show is targeted towards other practice managers out there but is obviously also probably valuable for SRNAs as it gives you a behinds the scenes look at how we plan team interviews for people applying to be on our team. So April’s out there… you can also meet Danielle Beaumont, our SRNA Clinical Coordinator at Maine Medical Center. Danielle is amazing in that role as she supports SRN As from the University of New England and Middle Tennessee School of Anesthesia. Danielle also just helped us establish clinical affiliations with Boston College and Northeastern University. We’re pumped to start welcoming primary anesthesia trainees from BC and NU in 2025. And then last but not least is Jillian Guzzardo. Jill is one of our per diem CRNAs at MMC but she also serves as the Chief CRNA at one of our MaineHealth sister hospitals, Pen Bay Medical Center in Rockland, Maine. If you’re looking for a small town, coastal Maine community hospital to practice at, Jill is your girl! Pen Bay is literally on a bluff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. You have close up water views from work. It’s amazing…. I mean, you can also see the ocean from the top floors of Maine Medical Center, but at Pen Bay, you can probably see what the lobstermen are having for breakfast as they motor by in the morning… it’s right there. Jill is one of my favorite CRNAs… after a few years of holding down the fort at Pen Bay as the chief CRNA, she reached out to me and asked if she could come work off shifts and weekends at Maine Medical Center to keep her high acuity patient care skills up. She literally asked if I would give her the shifts that my core team doesn’t want to work… nights, evenings and weekends. I was blown away.

All three of this CRNAs – April, Danielle and Jill – are baller clinicians. I would let any of them take care of me or my family and just love working alongside them in the OR. They’re also incredible CRNA leaders with a deep passion for helping SRNAs & CRNAs thrive in their practices. And they’re generally just inspiring, friendly humans… Kind, generous, optimistic people… who are wicked smahat as we say here in New England.

So if you’re headed to AANA Annual Congress, even if you’re not looking to move your practice to Maine, do yourself a favor and go meet these incredible people. April, Danielle and Jill will be pumped to meet you.

So that’s it… just wanted to drop a quick shoutout to those of you headed to AANA Annual Congress this weekend and say I hope it’s an amazing conference. Go get your learn on, meet some new friends and stop by the MaineHealth booth and tell my friends I said hello.

And with that… I’ll see ya next time!

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This episode originally appeared on the podcast From the Head of the Bed on August 6, 2015. It’s re-released here on August 17, 2021. Dr Shawn Collins, DNP, PhD, CRNA and I discuss the transition from Master’s level training for CRNAs to practice doctorates, most commonly the Doctor of Nursing Practice degree or DNP.

Every CRNA program must transition to the doctorate level for new classes by January 1, 2022, with every SRNA graduating from doctorate level training by 2025. Most of the 124 CRNA programs in the US have already transitioned to doctorate degrees, with some having done so more than a decade ago. Dr Collins and I discuss why CRNA training transitioned from the master’s level to the doctoral level and what this means for education, clinical practice and business.

Beginning the fall of 2019, the Council on Accreditation of Nurse Anesthesia Educational Programs, which sets the standards for university programs, began revising those standards based upon recommendations from a “Full Scope of Practice Competency Task Force.” The COA updated several standards and requirements of CRNA doctorate programs including increasing the number of required anesthesia cases, mandating specific training in the use of point of care ultrasound for diagnosis and therapeutic interventions, 12-lead ECG interpretation, radiology & flouroscopy use, chest X-ray interpretation and more. You can read about these changes and the specific requirements for CRNA doctoral programs at the COA’s website.

At the time of the interview, Dr Shawn Collins was the nurse anesthesia program director at Western Carolina University and the interim dean of the College of Health & Human Sciences.

He was the program director when I attended WCU and was a huge source of encouragement and support to me personally as I ran the gauntlet of anesthesia training. He was also instrumental in helping my classmates and I launch the podcast From the Head of the Bed, serving as our project chair and one of the co-authors of the paper we published on social media in nurse anesthesia education in the AANA Journal.

Dr Collins has obtained both his doctor of nursing practice degree and his PhD and compares these degrees, along with other types of doctoral programs, in this podcast.

He was instrumental in developing the DNP program at WCU, transitioning the master’s-level nurse anesthesia program to a practice doctorate. Dr Collins is currently the associate dean for academic affairs and graduate studies for Loma Linda University’s School of Nursing, where he supports 2 master’s programs, a PhD program and 8 clinical doctorates.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download