The pioneers of the nurse anesthetist role were nuns because most healthcare centres in the 19th century were founded and run by religious organizations. Additionally, laywomen who were from the Union and Confederacy offered services as nurses and were the first to administer ether and chloroform in their involvement in surgery. There are two well-known pioneers, including Sister Mary Benard, known for her skilful participation in anesthesia as a nurse, and Alice Magaw, who led the research on the use of different agents in anesthesia. Alice Magaw worked alongside Dr. Mayo, and from January 1899 to January 1990 alone, they conducted surgery on 1000 patients, documenting the agent used and its safety and efficacy (Tracy & O’Grady, 2019). In 1939, the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists was founded by the Lakeside Hospital School of Anaesthesia graduates, a school established by Agatha Hodgkins. The 1930s were crucial in settling the tension between nurses and their physician counterparts on who should administer anesthesia, and the courts’ ruling in favour of nurses in different cases set the precedence on nurse anesthesiology. There was an increased demand for nurse anesthetists during World War II, so much so that some were contracted to work in Europe and the Pacific, with patients requiring treatment at civilian and military hospitals, but most were documented to work at mobile evacuation hospitals. The boundaries of anesthesiology were expanded when nurse anesthetists played a vital role in surgical wound treatment in Korea and Vietnam. The profession was equally challenged by the trained nurses who would become casualties in the war they were serving. The other challenge was the lack of clear cut reimbursement expectations for certified registered nurse anesthetists, which changed in 1989 when they could bill Medicare for their services because of the third-party reimbursement they had secured (Tracy & O’Grady, 2019). AANA keeps improving the education standards for practicing as a nurse anesthetist. They have done so by introducing 120 accredited nurse anesthesia programs in 2017 alone, including 17 masters programs by the end of 2007 that they seek to add to.
It is important to discuss the evolution of the role of a nurse anesthetist because of the significance of the practice to different facets of healthcare. The significance of anesthesiology to the patient is that it enables them to go through surgery without feeling any pain or distress, it improves health outcomes, and changes attitudes towards the different treatment methods. For the nursing profession, it is an additional avenue to foster and provide safe and quality patient care which reinforces the significance of the profession (Swerdlow et al., 2020). Anesthesiology has impacted healthcare as it has allowed for the progress of medicine to treatment procedures that are intrusive, reduced mortality rates as it resolves morbidity and caused less psychological trauma to practitioners.
Various factors aided the evolution and prominence of the nurse anesthetist role. The injuries from World War I and II that required to be operated on with the use of anaesthesia increased demand in 1917 and 1942. The other wars that the United States was involved in provided a platform to practice and improve the profession. Healthcare policymakers who introduced the nurse anesthetist training programs after the Civil War in 1873 in New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut require as much credit, and so does the introduction of certification in 1939 (Tracy & O’Grady, 2019). Researchers who developed safer and longer-acting agents for anesthesia are crucial for how far the profession has come.
References
Swerdlow, B., Osborne-Smith, L., & Berry, D. (2020). Anesthesiologists Have an Important Role in Preclinical Nurse Anesthesia Education. Advances in medical education and practice, pp. 11, 997–1003. https://doi.org/10.2147/AMEP.S286546
Tracy, M. F., & O’Grady, E. T. (2019). Hamric and Hanson’s: Advanced Practice Nursing. An integrative approach (6th ed.). St. Louis: Elsevier.
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