Roles in practice

These describe the roles of a specialist anaesthetist and specialist pain medicine physician and how they apply to contemporary practice.

Note: For the specialist anaesthetist, each of these roles spans the entire vocational training program.

Medical expert

Description: knowledge, skills and attitudes required to perform as an anaesthetist.

Communicator

Description: communicating with staff, patients and families.

Communication activities that help establish rapport, trust, and ethical therapeutic relationships with patients and their families.

The ANZCA library has created an extensive library guide to support Communicator role activities.

Collaborator

Description: working within a healthcare team.

Leader and manager

Description: management of self, healthcare team and system.

Health advocate

Description: advancing the health of patients and community

Scholar

Description: continued self-learning, research and teaching.

Scholar role activities facilitate the development of trainees as teachers and learners.

All doctors have a role in the teaching and supervision of medical students, junior colleagues and other health professionals, so trainees are expected to develop proficiency as teachers.

In addition, trainees need to learn how to critically evaluate information and its sources and apply this appropriately to practice decisions. As such, trainees should understand how evidence is generated, how to evaluate it and determine its applicability to their patients and clinical setting. This requires a sound knowledge of audit, quality improvement, research methods and critical appraisal.

Finally, scholar role activities set the foundation for trainees to participate in regular practice review when they become specialists.

For more information on Scholar role activities and assessment for specialist anaesthetists, see the ANZCA handbook for training.

Evaluation forms and guidelines for specialist anaesthetists can be found in the Anaesthesia Trainee Toolkit.

The FPM ETA modules on Networks focus on integrating the Pain Medicine Roles in Practice with the clinical skills and knowledge of the nine essential topic areas and target a set of learning outcomes from the curriculum.

A number of scholar role resources are located in Networks.

The ANZCA library has created a library guide that provides additional training and resources to further support Scholar role activities.

Professional

Description: ethical practice, personal behaviour and profession-led regulation.

 
For more information on specialist anaesthetist roles in practice, see the ANZCA handbook for training.
Last updated 13:39 4.02.2022