With how big California is as a state and its population, I’m surprised that we only have 6 CRNA schools. UC Davis being the most recent one. California has the highest number of nurses. Crazy that Pennsylvania has 15 CRNAs programs.

We have 4250 new SRNAs (NCE 2025) in the pipeline per year now and that number will probably balloon more, that will bring the field to roughly 120k CRNAs in the next 30 years if schools stop expanding seats- I for one am more than happy to suffer more during school to protect the profession.

For context we only had 2794 NCE candidates in 2022.

Many younger CRNAs and SRNAS (our peers) are concerned about the saturation problem- what happened to the NP profession is awful, so is pharmacy. Once seats are established, they're very difficult to reverse.

CAA competition is a bullshit non-issue mainly raised by Private-Equity backed groups and Schools trying to make money, with the expansion of NORA and ASCS, Full-Practice CRNAs have their own niche that makes CAAs largely irrelevant.

Anesthesia pay is easily commoditized and PE groups + Hospitals WILL try to squeeze our pay down, they are pissed they're paying anesthesia stipends on top of reimbursement right now- making us labor costs, more then revenue generators.

There are things we can do-

1. Advocate to the COA for an increase in specialty case requirements- especially high resource cases like Peds and Cardiac. We could also advocate for a limit on distance sites, we shouldn't have to travel across the country, tuition is expensive enough.
2. Report your program if they are asking you to fake case or line counts- you will not get in trouble, you will still become a CRNA, it will ensure the school can't grow unchecked.
3. Advocate to your PD to slow seat growth, the math doesn't math, we will oversaturate the profession in the early to mid 2030s, even with substantial anesthesia demand growth- and they are STILL pushing for more seats.
4. Advocate for the AANA to be honest about workforce projections, HCA was one of the biggest sponsors of annual congress, if that isn't a huge red flag, idk what to say. (One meaningful light is it seems our new President is aware of oversupply risks as he projects 2027 to be the tipping point on his substack)

I just started clinical. Yesterday was day 4 for me and the supervising MD took me away from my preceptor and told me I was going to run my own room. Everything went smoothly and MD was present for induction and emergence (though very hands off.. and when i ask his opinion like if he thnks it’s safe to pull the ETT during emergence he would spin the question back to me and tell me to try and see what happens), but I was very uncomfortable at first and expressed that. He reassured me that if anything went wrong during the case to call and he would come in and fix it, but I was still nervous as heck.

Again, everything was fine, I managed the patient appropriately and woke them up smoothly and took them to PACU. I knew the day would come eventually where I’d have to run my own room but just not this soon. Anyways just wondering..Is this normal to be left alone this early in training? Am I being dramatic here??

It just felt very different being responsible for each decision and not having someone there watching me, and correcting me if necessary. I do feel like I learned a lot from the experience and looking back there are things I would’ve done differently in terms of the patient care and hopefully I can carry those lessons with me moving forward. Thanks for the input!