Anesthesia in the Operating Room

Anesthesia for Surgery

Using the Anesthesia Care Team approach, we provide our patients with safe, comfortable anesthesia for all types of surgical procedures performed at Rockdale Hospital. We are proficient in all types of anesthetic techniques including general anesthesia, regional anesthesia, and sedation.

The Anesthesia Care Team is composed of doctors who specialize in anesthesiology (called anesthesiologists) who work with and supervise nurses (called nurse anesthetists or CRNAs) or physician assistants (called anesthesiologists assistants or AAs) who are trained in techniques of anesthesia . The anesthesia care team is supported by an anesthesia tech who helps with equipment and setup. The anesthesia care team allows for intensive and efficient patient care with doctors and nurses working together to provide each patient with the best anesthesia care possible.

Anesthesiologists are doctors who have graduated from college and then medical school and then train for 4 more years in the practice of anesthesiology in an anesthesiology residency program. Unlike some anesthesia practices, all of our anesthesiologists are board certified by the American Board of Anesthesiology after undergoing rigorous written and oral examination. Some of our doctors also have special training in cardiac anesthesia and/or pain medicine. All of our doctors are well-trained in anesthesia for children called pediatric anesthesia. We provide pediatric anesthesia on a daily basis for tonsillectomies, hernia repairs, ear tubes, circumcisions, and a variety of other pediatric surgical procedures.

CRNAs or certified registered nurse anesthetists are nurses who graduate from nursing school as a registered nurse or a bachelor of sciences in nursing, then obtain critical care nursing experience, and then attend a school for nurse anesthesia for 2 to 3 years where most receive a masters degree. In our practice, CRNAs are supervised by anesthesiologists. They work with an anesthesiologist together as a team so that there are 2 sets of hands providing anesthesia during the critical parts of the anesthetic. All of our CRNAs have excellent training and an enormous amount of experience. CRNAs are at the pinnacle of nurse education and training.

We provide a spectrum of anesthetics and a large portion of our anesthetics are regional anesthetics. Most of our anesthetics are performed on outpatients (people who go home after surgery and do not have to stay in the hospital) and we tailor our anesthetics with short acting agents to enhance the outpatient experience. We also provide anesthetics for a large number of inpatients (people who stay in the hospital following surgery). Monitoring of patients under anesthesia is done with some of the most advanced equipment available.