Automation is starting to affect the ‘‘core'' work of anaesthetists, and that is challenging for some specialists, anaesthetist Ross Kennedy says.
Associate Prof Kennedy's talk to an Australia-New Zealand anaesthetists' conference in Auckland yesterday was called ‘‘Anaesthetic machine automation is good . . . or the devil's work?''
Prof Kennedy, a University of Otago (Christchurch) academic, said machines were able to monitor and adjust drug levels in patients and determine the best drug combinations.
‘‘A lot of us tend to have a favourite [drug] recipe and it's very easy to use that with minor adaptations for different groups of patients.
‘‘You can build an argument which says that for different operations and different types of patients, using something that is quite different [is beneficial].''
Automation itself was not new in anaesthesia, but it was now affecting core tasks.
‘‘People feel that their professionalism is threatened, whereas I would say it's enhanced.
‘‘It takes us from being a knob twiddler, if you like.''
Automation was an opportunity to focus more on how patients were feeling, and reducing their stress, while letting machines look after manual tasks.
‘‘Some of these devices are coming closer to the core of what we do.
‘‘Giving anaesthetic vapours, many people would regard as at the core . . . that's a skill that they see as uniquely around anaesthesia.''
There was more demand for anaesthesia now than ever, because older and sicker patients were having surgery, and technology helped the profession keep up.
Asked about the title of his talk, he said it was inspired by a ‘‘cynical colleague'' who pointed at a piece of up-to-date equipment and called it the ‘‘devil's work''.
So are machines better at looking after patients than specialists?
‘‘What we often find is not that the machine is better, but the machine is good at focusing on a particular task. Even during a routine case, you are often juggling a whole lot of tasks at once.''
