There is a severe shortage of anesthetists in the medical field. While the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends 1:5,000 (one anesthetist per 5,000 population), the situation in India is 1:50,000. There are just 30,000 anesthetists registered with the Indian Society of Anesthetists (ISA) and a few thousand unregistered ones. There distribution is also concentrated mainly in cities.

Anesthetists are the backbone of any surgery and they need to have knowledge about all other medical disciplines while working with surgeons of various specialties. The dearth is attributed mainly to government policies, lack of infrastructure in Community Healthcare Centres (CHCs / Area Hospitals), limited post-graduation seats, which varies between 15 and 18 in various government medical colleges of Andhra Pradesh. They also get involved in medico legal cases if the surgery goes wrong.

Elaborating on it, Dr. A Satyanarayana, head of the department of anesthesia at King George Hospital said, “Under National Rural Health Mission program, the government has decided to post units comprising a pediatrician, general physician, gynecologist and anesthetist at CHCs and area hospitals to bring down the maternal and infant mortality rate in villages, but there is no infrastructure for the anesthetists to do their jobs. Due to deficient infrastructure, even PGs have no work if they are posted there. Therefore, most anesthetists have to be based in cities with various government and private hospitals. The PG seats also range from 15-18 in various government medical colleges plus 10 national board seats in private sector. As a result, adequate number of anesthetist as per requirement, are not passing out of colleges every year”.

“In UK, there is an anesthetist per 8,000 population while in USA, it is 1:5000, and in India, it is 2:1 lakh population because we have about 30,000 registered anesthetists and around another 15,000 unregistered ones”, added Dr V Kuchela Babu, national president of ISA.

Speaking about various challenges faced by anesthetists, Dr. G Krishna from Care Hospital said, “Sometimes, in emergency trauma cases, where the patient has undergone severe bleeding, optimizing the patient for administering anesthesia before an immediate surgery becomes very difficult. Anesthesia on extreme ages (infants and geriatrics) is another problem as well as presence of co-morbid conditions in patients (such as diabetes, high BP, asthma, thyroid, cardiac problems) is another problem. If anything goes wrong, it is the anesthetist who mostly gets dragged in medico legal cases.

Source: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/visakhapatnam/india-has-1-anaesthetist-for-50000-population-that-too-mainly-in-cities/articleshow/65329653.cms