Workforce Capacity Hiding in Plain Sight
By FairShare Team · · 3 min read
The anesthesia staffing shortage is real and well-documented — a projected national shortfall of 6,300 anesthesiologists by 2036, facilities reporting staffing gaps that rose from 35% in early 2020 to 78% by late 2022, and CRNAs providing over 80% of rural anesthesia care with a workforce that's aging and facing a new doctorate-entry requirement that may slow the training pipeline further.
Given all that, it would be reasonable to conclude the only real fix is hiring — more residency slots, more recruitment budget, more locum coverage. And to be clear, those are genuinely necessary, structural, policy-level responses that no single department can substitute for entirely.
The part a department can move this quarter
But the burnout and retention research covered across this series points to something adjacent and more immediately actionable: a meaningful share of the anesthesiologists and CRNAs already on staff report they'd stay, or work more sustainably, under different conditions. Recall the figures:
- A 2024 Anesthesiology study found staffing was the top factor anesthesiologists said would help address burnout — but schedule flexibility, workplace culture, and leadership support were close behind, all cited by roughly half of respondents.
- A national CRNA study found autonomy was linked to lower burnout independent of hours worked.
- Separate research on physician schedule control found that poor control over one's clinical schedule was independently associated with intent to leave — a variable a department can influence today, unlike the residency-slot bottleneck upstream.
Put together, this suggests real, if partial, capacity may already exist inside a department's current headcount — clinicians who would take on more, stay longer, or feel less compelled to leave if flexibility, fairness, and recognition were structurally built into how the schedule works, rather than left to informal goodwill and an Excel sheet.
That's not a substitute for the hiring and policy fixes this shortage genuinely requires. But it's the part of the problem a department can start working on this quarter, while the training pipeline catches up over the next decade. FairShare is built to be exactly that starting point.
Sources
- Afonso AM, et al. U.S. Attending Anesthesiologist Burnout in the Postpandemic Era. Anesthesiology. 2024;140(1):38–51.
- Becker's ASC workforce reporting citing 2025 Medicus Healthcare Solutions data.
- Mahoney CB, et al. Turnover, Burnout, and Job Satisfaction of CRNAs in the United States. AANA Journal. 2020;88(1):39–48.
- Sinsky CA, et al. Association of Work Control With Burnout and Career Intentions Among U.S. Physicians. Annals of Internal Medicine. 2024.