First Day of Anesthesia Clinical

This is it. The day has finally arrived to start clinical rotations at LAC-USC Medical Center in the Anesthesia department as a Student Registered Nurse Anesthetist (SRNA). After all of the academic preparation, this is the payoff.

Today was spent with the staff at the Los Angeles County Medical Center doing orientation duties, receiving lockers, pager assignments and generally getting used to the large place. Our clinical assignments were made for tomorrow and we were able to call the Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist (CRNA) staff members that we will be working with in the morning. For me, I will be covering the Emergency OR for general surgery. Sounds exciting but from what I am told most likely the day will be slow. For the first day of our anesthesia rotation at the LAC it will be nice to be with a very experienced staff member. The physician attending staff at the LAC Hospital is a wonderful group, very experienced and used to working together with CRNA’s. The relationship that is fostered at the LAC is a strong collegial one with Dr. Philip Lumb as head of the Anesthesia department in the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California.

CRNA’s are the Nations largest anesthesia providers, reportedly performing over 50% of anesthetics and in some reports up to as much as 65% of all general anesthesia. To learn more about the practice of the Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist, the resources of the National organization, American Association of Nurse Anesthetists (AANA) may be resorted to.