February 16–22, 2026 · Executive brief
CAA Week 2026
Build a safe anesthesia workforce model with clear authority, verified credentials, precise privileges, deliberate team integration, and a learning system that can detect drift.
The leadership signal
CAA workforce strategy begins with operating design, not a job requisition.
CAA Week, observed February 16–22, 2026, offers healthcare leaders a practical moment to examine how a certified anesthesiologist assistant moves from candidate to trusted member of an anesthesiologist-led care team. Recognition matters. The more durable executive contribution is a system in which role authority, credentials, privileges, clinical expectations, communication, supervision, escalation, and improvement work as one design.
Anesthesia has become an enterprise service. It supports operating rooms, obstetrics, ambulatory surgery, diagnostic and interventional areas, emergency demand, and other non-operating-room locations. As that footprint expands, so does the communication network surrounding each case. Ortega and colleagues describe communication as a central challenge for the expanding anesthesia enterprise, a useful reminder that growth adds interfaces as well as capacity.1 A staffing plan can look complete in a spreadsheet and remain unreliable if the professionals inside it do not share the same operating picture.
The executive question is therefore not simply, “How many anesthesia professionals do we need?” It is, “What system will make every appropriately qualified professional reliably deployable for the patients, procedures, locations, and conditions we serve?” That question requires joint ownership. Physician anesthesiologists, CAAs, nursing, surgery, procedural services, medical staff, credentialing, compliance, human resources, education, quality, finance, and operations each control part of the pathway. No single department can repair the whole pathway after the fact.
Capacity is not headcount
A signed offer does not become clinical capacity until authority, source verification, privileges, orientation, competency, payer or facility requirements, schedule readiness, and supervision arrangements are complete.
Teamwork is not proximity
People working near one another do not automatically share mental models. Role clarity, briefings, closed-loop communication, structured handoffs, and psychological safety must be designed and practiced.
Reliability is not a policy
A policy establishes expectations. Reliability requires visible ownership, usable workflows, observed practice, feedback, exception review, and correction when local work begins to drift.
Executive priority: choose one high-volume or strategically important anesthesia pathway and follow a CAA assignment from workforce demand through credentialing, privileging, onboarding, daily team practice, handoff, and performance review. Document every wait, rework loop, unclear decision right, and informal workaround.
This brief does not recommend one universal staffing configuration and does not compare the worth of one anesthesia profession with another. A 2026 retrospective analysis of 5,632 atrial-fibrillation ablation cases found comparable short-term outcomes across three anesthesiologist-led configurations and modeled meaningful labor-cost variation, but it examined specific procedures at two academic centers and did not include a CAA arm.7 Its executive lesson is narrower and more useful: staffing configuration can affect operating economics, and local decisions should be tested with appropriately attributed quality, access, workforce, and cost measures.
State law, regulatory requirements, medical-staff bylaws, payer rules, facility policy, contracts, and the organization’s approved model remain controlling. Leaders should validate current requirements with qualified clinical, medical-staff, compliance, and legal experts. CAA Week is an opportunity to make that validation visible and repeatable—not to substitute an awareness campaign for governance.
What the evidence supports
Design the interfaces around the clinician.
The strongest implementation signal across the reviewed literature is not a single staffing ratio. It is the importance of structured communication, shared education, role clarity, feedback, and risk controls across the anesthesia and perioperative system.
A 2026 systematic review of 17 studies on intraoperative anesthesia handovers found that structured approaches—including checklists, SBAR, I-PASS, and cognitive aids—generally improved information transfer and reduced variation, while outcome findings remained heterogeneous.2 That distinction matters. A hospital can reasonably standardize critical handoff content and still avoid claiming that one tool guarantees a clinical outcome. The implementation target is dependable information transfer, observed adoption, and an improvement signal that is interpreted in context.
Shared learning also appears operationally promising. Thurston and colleagues described an interprofessional anesthesia education program developed by a task force and expanded to preadmission, preoperative, and postanesthesia care staff. Among 62 respondents from 100 invitees, 88% reported an improved team culture, 80% felt more engaged, and 96% would recommend the program; reported practice changes were based on a smaller subset and the findings came from one program.3 The result is not proof of generalizable clinical benefit. It is a strong design prompt: recurring, inclusive learning can create relationships before a high-stakes event tests them.
Simulation can make those relationships observable. A 2025 pilot involving 66 doctoral nurse-anesthesia students and 106 post-simulation surveys reported favorable perceptions of team interaction, communication, peer mentoring, and readiness after a game-based “Sim Wars” experience.10 Because the study used learners and self-reported outcomes, leaders should not treat it as evidence of improved patient outcomes. They can, however, use simulation to test whether team members state concerns, clarify roles, use escalation language, share workload, and close communication loops under pressure.
Patients reporting reduced anesthesia-related anxiety after consultation
Single-institution prospective, patient-blinded pre/post study; communication-trained clinicians were compared with a control period. This is a communication finding, not a CAA staffing comparison.
Patient communication belongs inside the workforce model because technical availability does not ensure usable access. In pediatric anesthesia, Branche and colleagues found gaps between awareness of language-service needs and actual access to interpreters; their mixed-methods study also surfaced caregiver and clinician themes that cannot be reduced to a single utilization rate.6 In another study of older surgical patients and their clinicians, 59.8% of provider respondents described preoperative communication as logistically challenging, 92.5% of primary-care respondents reported rarely or never communicating with anesthesia, and only 40.4% of patient respondents believed their clinicians communicated very or extremely well.14 Those data came from a single rural tertiary setting and survey response rates were limited, yet they make an important operational point: information outside the anesthesia department can determine readiness inside it.
Executives should therefore fund communication as infrastructure. That means interpreter availability, preoperative escalation channels, common handoff fields, identity and role introductions, documented supervisory expectations, rapid contact pathways, and protected time for shared learning. These are not soft additions to the clinical model. They are how the model connects.
The clinical airlock
Move from qualified candidate to reliable practice through controlled gates.
A clinical airlock is a management metaphor for the set of gates between recruitment and independent schedule deployment. Each gate answers a different question. Collapsing them into one “credentialed” status hides risk and delays.
The CAA clinical airlock
Every gate has evidence, an accountable owner, an escalation path, and a definition of complete. The sequence is proposed operating design, not a regulatory standard.
Validate current law, regulations, bylaws, contracts, payer requirements, supervision expectations, and approved care settings.
Verify education, certification, licensure, identity, history, references, sanctions, and other locally required credentials.
Match requested privileges to evidence, facility capability, patient population, procedure risk, and proctoring criteria.
Practice roles, escalation, handoffs, location workflows, equipment, emergency response, and documentation.
Apply case-selection, coverage, availability, response, and change-of-condition rules on the operating schedule.
Transfer patient state, risk, plan, outstanding work, and ownership with closed-loop acceptance.
Examine access, reliability, quality, experience, fatigue, exceptions, and balancing measures with defined attribution.
Use observed practice and changing service needs to inform reappointment, education, privileges, and system changes.
Authority and operating model. Before recruitment, leaders should document where CAAs may practice, the physician-anesthesiologist leadership and supervision design, which facilities and service lines are in scope, and how local bylaws and contracts express the model. Avoid relying on a generic job description to carry decisions that belong in medical-staff governance, policy, clinical leadership, and schedule design. If stakeholders use the same words differently—“supervision,” “direction,” “availability,” “immediately available,” or “handoff”—define the behaviors and escalation expectations locally.
Source verification and privileges. Credentialing verifies facts about a professional. Privileging authorizes a defined scope of practice in a defined organization. Orientation teaches the local system. Competency assessment tests performance. These functions inform one another but are not interchangeable. A fast process should remove duplicate handling and idle time, not weaken verification or blur decisions. Track elapsed time at each gate, the share of files returned for missing information, and the most common dependencies outside the applicant’s control.
CAA education research can inform pipeline design without being overextended. Two single-program retrospective studies at Emory found that undergraduate grade-point averages had moderate relationships with academic performance and that MCAT scores correlated more consistently with science-course performance than GRE scores; predictive relationships weakened for the clinical curriculum.1213 A 2026 survey of program directors adds perspective on how admissions leaders view selection measures.5 Together, these studies support careful, multi-factor selection and the need to distinguish academic prediction from clinical performance. They do not justify using a single score as a proxy for professional readiness.
Team onboarding and deployment. Build onboarding around work that the new clinician will actually encounter. Include high-volume pathways, high-consequence exceptions, non-operating-room locations, equipment differences, documentation standards, language access, emergency resources, escalation contacts, and handoff expectations. A professional who is qualified on paper may still be unfamiliar with a site’s geography, supply patterns, call structure, technology, and informal coordination norms. Those are system risks, not personal shortcomings.
Review and renewal. The airlock does not end on the first scheduled day. Early check-ins should surface mismatched expectations, unnecessary workarounds, missing equipment access, ambiguous coverage, or disrespectful team behaviors. Formal performance review should combine case-relevant clinical governance with access, reliability, professional experience, patient communication, and learning signals. The purpose is not surveillance. It is to keep a new operating model aligned as people, demand, and locations change.
Failure-mode review
When integration feels personal, look for a system cause first.
Unclear roles, delayed credentials, inconsistent supervision, weak handoffs, and inadequate learning time often surface as interpersonal tension. Leaders should address behavior directly when needed while also testing whether the operating design is creating predictable conflict.
Potential contributors to unreliable CAA team integration
These categories are qualitative and unranked. They are prompts for local investigation, not measured frequencies or causal weights.
Outdated bylaws, unclear policy ownership, inconsistent interpretation, or an approved model that does not match schedule practice.
Duplicate requests, missing source data, ambiguous privilege criteria, slow committee routing, or inconsistent proctoring.
Unclear case-selection rules, variable supervision expectations, late assignment changes, or uncertain escalation ownership.
No common critical fields, role assumptions, weak closed-loop practice, language barriers, or fragmented preoperative information.
Schedule compression, fatigue, insufficient backup, unsupported locations, or productivity pressure that crowds out learning.
One-time orientation, limited simulation, low psychological safety, absent feedback, or incident review that does not reach redesign.
A qualitative study of CRNA perspectives within anesthesia care teams illustrates why language and relationships matter. Participants distinguished collaboration from a supervision-centered experience and described both strengths and conflict-resolution needs.11 The study represents one professional group’s perspectives; it should not be treated as a complete account of all anesthesia team members or as CAA evidence. It is still useful because executives need to hear how formal models are experienced in daily work. A policy can be technically correct and relationally corrosive if people lack voice, role clarity, or a trusted way to resolve disagreement.
Use a just, specific review. Ask what happened, what people expected, which information was available, how workload and time shaped action, where the policy was usable or not, and who could have detected the mismatch earlier. Separate reckless behavior from human error, system constraints, and reasonable differences in professional judgment. Then close the loop. Teams disengage when they repeatedly report friction and never hear what leaders changed.
Feedback should also include non-technical performance. In a 2025 study of 88 academic surgeons, 699 intraoperative evaluations generated substantial feedback related to leadership, communication, teamwork, decision-making, and situation awareness; the categories overlapped and the setting limits generalizability.9 The operational lesson is that perioperative colleagues can observe actionable team behaviors. A mature anesthesia operating system invites structured, respectful feedback across roles and gives professionals a safe way to turn that information into development.
Workforce well-being belongs in this same review. In a national survey of 457 CAAs, 24.1% scored high on emotional exhaustion and 10.3% scored high on depersonalization; the response rate was 19.7%, and the cross-sectional design cannot establish causation.15 Leaders should not turn those figures into a current prevalence estimate for their own organization. They should treat them as a warning that role integration, fairness, resources, workload, empowerment, and administrative communication can affect resilience. Pair wellness resources with operating fixes that reduce avoidable overload and uncertainty.
Team practice
Make the care model visible at the bedside and on the schedule.
People should not have to reverse-engineer the anesthesia care model during a busy operating day. The schedule, pre-case brief, clinical documentation, contact pathways, and escalation plan should reinforce the same expectations.
Start with identity and role. Team members should introduce themselves in a way that patients and colleagues can understand. Avoid titles, abbreviations, or clothing cues as the only signal of responsibility. The patient should know who is leading the anesthesia plan, who will be continuously present, how the team works together, and where questions belong. The same clarity helps surgeons, nurses, technicians, and procedural-area staff coordinate with the anesthesia team.
Brief the conditions that could change the plan. A useful brief is short enough to survive workload and specific enough to influence action. Include patient-specific anesthesia risk, procedural plan, airway and access considerations, blood or medication readiness, positioning, anticipated transitions, location constraints, competing coverage, backup, and the triggers that require a new decision. For complex cases, state who has authority to pause, call for additional expertise, or reallocate resources.
Use closed-loop escalation. “Call if needed” is not an operating rule. Define what should trigger contact, who is first call, what response is expected, what to do if the first pathway fails, and how the situation is documented. Simulation can test the pathway when conditions are noisy, roles change, and the first response is unavailable. Debrief whether the pathway was understood and usable—not just whether the final clinical action was correct.
Standardize handoffs around the receiver’s next decisions. Transfer identity, procedure, relevant history, anesthesia course, airway, access, medications, fluids, current physiologic state, pain and nausea plan, unfinished work, expected trajectory, and escalation thresholds. The sender should state what the receiver now owns; the receiver should have a protected opportunity to question, correct, and accept. Leaders should observe samples in real conditions before assuming a template has been adopted.
Design for language access. Interpreter access and translated materials must fit the time and location of anesthesia work. If an interpreter can be requested only through a slow or unfamiliar pathway, policy availability may not become actual availability. Review where language needs are identified, how the need remains visible across transitions, and who verifies that risk explanations and postanesthesia instructions were understood.6
Reliability rule: the care model is not fully implemented until a patient, a receiving nurse, a surgeon, a CAA, and the supervising physician anesthesiologist can each describe the same roles, current plan, and escalation pathway.
Enterprise design
Govern CAA capacity as a connected operating system.
The clinical team sits at the center of a larger system. Each surrounding function can enable safe capacity—or create friction that appears later as a staffing problem.
Interfaces that support patient-safe anesthesia care
The hub is not a reporting hierarchy. It shows the interfaces that must exchange decisions, information, and feedback.
Board and executive oversight. The governing body does not design daily assignments, but it should be able to see whether anesthesia capacity aligns with strategy, whether medical-staff processes are functioning, whether risk and workforce signals are reviewed together, and whether leaders respond to persistent barriers. Growth plans for surgery, obstetrics, or procedural care should include the time and infrastructure required to recruit, credential, privilege, orient, and retain the anesthesia workforce.
Medical-staff and clinical governance. Current criteria, decision rights, supervision expectations, professional practice evaluation, reappointment, and peer review should form a coherent system. When the care model changes, update the documents and workflows that express it. Avoid a state in which bylaws say one thing, privilege forms imply another, policies use different terminology, and schedules operate by tradition.
Workforce and finance. Model deployable capacity, not only funded positions. Include recruitment lead time, credentialing cycle time, onboarding capacity, site-specific readiness, leave, call burden, vacancies, turnover, premium labor, and the effect of schedule variation. Separate assumptions from observed data. Labor-cost estimates from a narrowly defined service line can frame scenarios, but they should not be generalized to an enterprise without local cost, case-mix, outcome, and workflow analysis.7
Quality, safety, and data. Assign attribution before publishing measures. A late first case may involve patient readiness, surgeon availability, nursing, equipment, room turnover, transportation, or anesthesia. If every delay is labeled “anesthesia” because the anesthesia team was the final visible gate, the dashboard will damage trust and drive the wrong intervention. Use a short list of mutually understood categories, allow more than one contributing cause when warranted, and audit classification consistency.
Education and patient experience. Shared learning should connect to actual exceptions. If handoff audits show missing airway information, simulate and observe that transfer. If patients do not understand team roles, test introductions and education materials. If remote procedural locations have weak escalation, rehearse the call tree. This keeps education from becoming an annual completion event detached from how the system performs.
Decision-grade measurement
Pair capacity measures with safety, experience, and balancing signals.
A trustworthy dashboard begins with definitions. It shows the denominator, owner, cadence, exclusions, attribution rules, and balancing measure—not just a favorable or unfavorable number.
Executive scorecard for CAA workforce integration
Use local baselines and targets. Stratify by site, service line, shift, and relevant patient population when sample size and privacy protections allow.
| Domain | Measure and denominator | Accountable owner | Cadence | Balancing signal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Deployable capacity | CAAs fully ready for scheduled scope ÷ CAAs with an accepted offer or active appointment in the measured cohort | Anesthesia operations with medical staff | Weekly pipeline; monthly trend | Verification defects, rushed exceptions, or restricted assignments |
| Cycle time | Median days from complete application to verified credentials, approved privileges, orientation complete, and first eligible schedule day | Credentialing and onboarding leaders | Monthly by gate | Returned files, applicant burden, and decision-quality audit |
| Schedule reliability | Anesthesia-attributed delays, cancellations, or transfers ÷ eligible cases, using agreed attribution rules | Perioperative operations | Daily review; monthly trend | Overtime, compressed turnover, and staff-reported workload |
| Handoff reliability | Observed handoffs with all locally defined critical elements and receiver acceptance ÷ audited handoffs | Anesthesia quality with nursing | Weekly sample; monthly review | Handoff duration, duplication, and work interruption |
| Escalation reliability | Events in which the defined escalation pathway was used and acknowledged within the locally specified expectation ÷ audited eligible events | Clinical anesthesia leadership | Monthly, with case review | False alarms, delayed primary work, and psychological safety |
| Team experience | Pulse items on role clarity, professional voice, support, fairness, workload, and learning; report response rate with results | Anesthesia leadership and HR | Quarterly | Turnover, vacancy, leave, and qualitative themes |
| Patient communication | Patients who can identify the anesthesia team’s roles and escalation/contact plan ÷ surveyed eligible patients | Patient experience with anesthesia | Monthly sample | Interpreter delay and consultation duration |
| Learning system | Reviewed integration exceptions with documented owner, action, and feedback to reporters ÷ eligible reported exceptions | Quality and service-line sponsor | Monthly | Reporting burden and closure without meaningful change |
Do not convert every signal into a benchmark. Some measures are most useful as local trends. Credentialing cycle time depends on when the clock starts, whether an application is complete, which outside sources are required, committee schedules, and whether a site runs steps in parallel. Report both the end-to-end measure and the time inside each gate. That helps leaders distinguish applicant delay, verification delay, governance delay, onboarding capacity, and schedule demand.
Use qualitative information alongside rates. Burnout research, team-perspective studies, and 360-degree feedback all depend on context and response behavior.91115 A low survey response can conceal problems; a high report volume can reflect either more hazards or greater trust in reporting. Review trends with frontline staff and state what the data cannot show.
Equity should be part of operational analysis, not a separate annual appendix. Examine whether language need, location, disability accommodation, insurance processes, transportation, or access to preoperative evaluation changes readiness and delay. Use privacy-preserving aggregation and avoid unstable comparisons when denominators are small. The purpose is to identify a pathway that serves some patients less reliably and redesign the pathway—not to assign blame to a population.
Finally, measure correction. Teams notice whether reported problems lead to action. Track the share of reviewed exceptions that receive an owner, due date, disposition, and feedback to those who raised the concern. Closing a ticket is not the same as reducing recurrence. Recheck the work after implementation and keep a balancing measure visible.
Ninety-day activation
Use CAA Week to launch one controlled improvement.
A narrow, observed test produces more value than a broad redesign that never reaches daily work. Select one pathway where demand is real, leadership is engaged, and the team can see whether the change helps.
A 90-day CAA integration reliability test
Timing is illustrative. Governance or credentialing decisions must follow required review and cannot be compressed merely to meet the project calendar.
Days 1–30: See the current system
- Name an executive sponsor, physician-anesthesiologist leader, CAA partner, and operational owner.
- Validate the operating model against current governing requirements and medical-staff documents.
- Map one recent journey from accepted offer to a fully eligible schedule assignment.
- Observe ten briefings or handoffs and review ten recent integration or capacity exceptions.
- Define one primary measure, one balancing measure, and the attribution rules.
Days 31–60: Test the interfaces
- Remove one avoidable credentialing or onboarding rework loop without weakening required review.
- Test a clear role introduction, pre-case brief, handoff structure, and escalation pathway in one location.
- Run a simulation that includes an unavailable first contact, a patient-language need, or an assignment change.
- Collect feedback from CAAs, physician anesthesiologists, nursing, surgery, and patients where appropriate.
- Review every exception within a short learning cycle and adjust the design.
Days 61–90: Stabilize and decide
- Compare the primary and balancing measures with baseline; state sample and limitations.
- Confirm that the changed workflow matches policy, privileges, training, and schedule practice.
- Embed the reliable elements in onboarding, competencies, standard work, and audit.
- Report back to frontline teams on what changed, what did not, and why.
- Select the next constraint only after the first improvement has a named owner and review cadence.
The implementation team should resist announcing success from adoption alone. A completed orientation, signed checklist, or published policy confirms an activity; it does not confirm that the team can execute the model under normal variation. Observe work across shifts and locations. Include cases in which the schedule changes, a patient arrives with incomplete information, an interpreter is needed, equipment differs, or the expected supervisor is temporarily occupied.
Protect the relational work. Shared education in one anesthesiology program was associated with strong self-reported culture and engagement results, but participation and response patterns matter.3 Use attendance, pulse feedback, behavioral observation, and exception data together. Invite dissent about the workflow without framing questions as resistance to the profession or the strategy. A clinician can support the model and still identify a hazardous detail.
Communicate to the wider organization with precision. Explain what a CAA is, how the local anesthesia team is structured, what patients can expect, and how questions are answered. Avoid claims that exceed evidence, comparisons that diminish other anesthesia professionals, or generic assurances unsupported by the organization’s actual processes. Recognition language should match operating reality.
Leadership close
Questions that turn recognition into governance.
CAA Week can celebrate a profession and also give leaders a disciplined way to test whether the organization has built the conditions for safe, respectful, and sustainable practice.
- Can we state the current legal, regulatory, medical-staff, contractual, and facility basis for our CAA model?
- Do credentialing, privileging, orientation, competency, scheduling, and supervision use consistent definitions?
- Where does an accepted CAA candidate wait, repeat work, or lack a clear owner before becoming deployable?
- Can the patient and perioperative team identify anesthesia roles without relying on assumptions?
- Does the pre-case brief make changes in patient risk, plan, coverage, and escalation visible?
- Are structured handoffs observed in real work, or only present in training materials?
- Can team members raise a concern across professional roles without predictable retaliation or dismissal?
- Do we review workload, fairness, empowerment, fatigue, and professional development with the same seriousness as vacancies?
- Are delays and cancellations attributed with enough precision to guide the right intervention?
- Does language access work at the time and place anesthesia conversations occur?
- When teams report an integration problem, do they hear what was learned and changed?
- Which single interface will we improve during the next 90 days, and who owns the result?
A strong CAA model is visible in the work.
It is visible when authority and privileges align, when qualified professionals move through a dependable readiness pathway, when roles are clear, when handoffs transfer the next decision, when escalation works under pressure, when workload is sustainable, and when the organization learns from exceptions. CAA Week is an appropriate time to recognize individual contribution. The executive legacy is a system that lets that contribution become reliable patient care.
Executive action: sponsor one 90-day clinical-airlock test and report back to the anesthesia and perioperative teams on the constraint removed, the measure changed, the balancing signal, and the next unresolved risk.
Continue the system view: connect this brief with National CRNA Week 2026, PeriAnesthesia Nurse Awareness Week 2026, and the 2026 Health Observance Calendar.
Resources and evidence
Authoritative starting points
- American Academy of Anesthesiologist Assistants: CAA Week
- American Academy of Anesthesiologist Assistants
- Accreditation Review Committee for the Anesthesiologist Assistant
- National Commission for Certification of Anesthesiologist Assistants
Peer-reviewed references
- Dasani S, et al. Labor cost variation and clinical outcomes across anesthesiologist-led staffing models for atrial fibrillation ablation procedures. Journal of Cardiothoracic and Vascular Anesthesia. Published online August 13, 2026. doi:10.1053/j.jvca.2026.08.128.
- Ortega R, Jalihal P, Faragon C, Zhao H. Orchestrating communication in the expanding anesthesia enterprise. Anesthesiology. Published online July 29, 2026. doi:10.1097/ALN.0000000000006185.
- Thurston K, Vining B, Nahass B, et al. Development of an interprofessional health care team shared-education program to promote collaboration and teamwork in anesthesiology. Journal of PeriAnesthesia Nursing. 2026;41(3):559–563. doi:10.1016/j.jopan.2025.08.013.
- Zech N, Bauer A, Hansen E. Communication training for the preoperative anesthesia consultation reduces anxiety: a prospective, patient-blinded pre-post intervention study. Anesthesia & Analgesia. 2026;142(5):869–878. doi:10.1213/ANE.0000000000007791.
- Azizi Darbandi MM, Gholamzadeh M, Mamizadeh A, Ranjbar Z, Shiri Zilan B. Structured intraoperative patient handover among anesthesia providers and its role in patient safety and team communication: a systematic review. Archives of Anesthesiology and Critical Care. 2026;12(3):299–309. doi:10.18502/aacc.v12i3.21318.
- Patel GP, Stever JM, Monroe KS. Perceptions of admissions metrics among anesthesiologist assistant program directors: a cross-sectional survey. Anesthesia & Analgesia. 2026;142(4):813–815. doi:10.1213/ANE.0000000000007772.
- Branche K, Gallardo P, Carreon Y, Ehie O. Enhancing communication in pediatric anesthesia: the impact of language barriers on caregiver and clinician interaction. Pediatric Anesthesia. 2026;36(3):271–280. doi:10.1002/pan.70102.
- Wetchakama C, Noitasaeng P, Sangjak P, Vichitvejpaisal P. Risk management in anesthesia practice: a systematic review across the five stages of risk control. Journal of the Medical Association of Thailand. 2025;108(12):1020–1026. doi:10.35755/jmedassocthai.2025.12.1020-1026-02257.
- Soelling SJ, Cummins E, Sinyard RD, et al. Using 360-degree feedback to identify actionable strategies to improve surgeon intraoperative non-technical skills. American Journal of Surgery. 2025;247:116277. doi:10.1016/j.amjsurg.2025.116277.
- Gonzaga Gomez NA, Hauglum SD, Mitzova-Vladinov G, Acevedo D, Ocampo-Salazar AF. Team building and communication: “Sim Wars” game-based learning and peer-to-peer mentoring. Clinical Simulation in Nursing. 2025;104:101761. doi:10.1016/j.ecns.2025.101761.
- Dabney C, Carter M, Herr M, Monroe T, Moore J, Sublette N. A narrative, qualitative research study of CRNA perspectives of practice within the anesthesia care team model. AANA Journal. 2025;93(1):45–52. doi:10.70278/AANAJ/.0000001027.
- Monroe KS, Amerson L, Bundy W, et al. Pre-admission standardized tests and the relationship with anesthesiologist assistant student performance: a retrospective analysis. Advances in Medical Education and Practice. 2024;15:815–819. doi:10.2147/AMEP.S480696.
- Monroe KS, Bundy W, Greene Y, Jarvis G, Stever J, Patel GP. Impact of pre-admission grade point averages on anesthesiologist assistant student performance at Emory University School of Medicine. Advances in Medical Education and Practice. 2024;15:611–614. doi:10.2147/AMEP.S465374.
- Ron D, Gunn CM, Havidich JE, Ballacchino MM, Burdick TE, Deiner SG. Preoperative communication between anesthesia, surgery, and primary care providers for older surgical patients. Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety. 2024;50(5):326–337. doi:10.1016/j.jcjq.2024.01.006.
- Kroll H, Monroe KS, Van Harn MG, Davies NA, Jesse MT. Burnout in certified anesthesiologist assistants. Journal of Allied Health. 2020;49(2):e73–e78. PMID:32469378.
Reviewed August 2026. CAA Week dates are from the American Academy of Anesthesiologist Assistants. This executive brief supports organizational planning and education. It does not replace clinical judgment, legal advice, medical-staff governance, credentialing and privileging review, payer guidance, or applicable federal and state requirements. Research findings are summarized with study-specific limitations and should not be interpreted as proof that one anesthesia profession or staffing configuration is universally superior.