Training of Non-Physician Anaesthesia Personnel in Turkey: From Past to Today

The role of non-physicians health workers in raising the public health level is great and when health services are offered with a multidisciplinary approach, the desired results can be achieved. In Turkey, there are vocational schools of health services besides medical faculties and health faculties where health education is given. As a result of these needs, health professionals were required to provide technical support to the anesthesia physician as a result of the dangerous and risky interventions of anesthesia applications and the use of complicated instruments and pharmacology in these applications. The anesthesia program is a pre-Bachelor program with the aim of providing the necessary professional competence. In our country, he pioneered anesthesia education in 1984, Hacettepe University. In the following years, under the supervision of Trakya University (1986), Ankara University (1988), Ege University (1989), anesthesia associate degree education was started. The first anesthesia program was opened at Kadir Has University in 1999, followed by Istanbul Bilim University (2006), Ufuk university (2007) and Başkent University (2008). Anesthesia program as of 2019-2020 academic year, there are 81 universities/vocational schools, 36 of which are state and 45 of which are foundations. In recent years, the units given anesthesia training have increased to disrupt supply-demand balance, both in the state and foundation universities. This uncontrolled increase, accompanied by the lack of specialized teaching staff and the insufficiency of some educational institutions for infrastructure and vocational applications, brought with it the lack of adequate skills and serious employment problems for graduates. In this review, the data on the number of schools and the number of students who have been given an anaesthesiology associate education by years and the data on the number of graduates in our country are presented with recommendations for the supervision of the employment relationship and the provision of adequate and qualified anaesthesiology education.