Service Chiefs’ Advisory Council: Planning for 2025 and Beyond

The Service Chiefs’ Advisory Council (SCAC) was born from a desire to unite individuals around the country with the broadest purview over their local anesthesiology critical care practice. In bringing together those one or two individuals from each organization, SCAC facilitates communication, collaboration, networking, and broader insights into the national anesthesiology critical care practice landscape. For SOCCA as a professional organization, it is critically important to have both line of sight into the forces influencing trainees when considering a career in critical care and the downstream issues impacting both individual clinicians in practice and the broader issues impacting our subspeciality. The Program Directors’ Advisory Council is intended to address the former and SCAC the latter.

Myriad factors have served to influence the anesthesiology labor market over the past five years. In short, increasing demand and lingering impacts from disruptions in the 1990s served to limit, or at least maldistribute, the anesthesiology workforce. This has led to a highly competitive anesthesiology job market. Through this lens, many anesthesiology critical care practices are seeking to critically evaluate the clinical responsibilities and compensation of their physicians. In contrast to the broader specialty of anesthesiology, our subspecialty is notably lacking market data to inform these decisions. On a broader scale beyond only our subspeciality, national standards concerning how to define full-time equivalency in critical care remain unanswered. Exploring these important questions is further frustrated by substantial inter-specialty and inter-institutional variability in how these questions and models are conceptualized and discussed.

Moving from the abstract to the concrete, the SCAC will soon undertake a nationwide survey of critical care anesthesiology compensation and full-time equivalent models. The aims are to provide accurate market data for our subspeciality, work toward a data-driven consensus as to optimal practice organization in current state, help to inform ideal future state, and to offer summary findings as a SOCCA membership benefit. Previous survey efforts have been targeted at individual respondents, which introduces challenges associated with both the accuracy and representativeness of responses and, ergo, the survey results. As such, the SCAC survey will be conducted on a institutional level and aim to create a generalizable framework to report full time equivalency and compensation models that should yield both accurate and granular insights.

At the 2025 SOCCA Business Meeting, the leadership of SCAC will transition to Dr. Anne Drewry serving as Chair and Dr. Sheida Tabaie serving as Vice Chair with an anticipated term of two years. SCAC will need to identify a new Secretary from among its ranks soon thereafter. Dr. Craig Jabaley will continue to support the group in an Immediate Past Chair capacity, to include managing, updating, and streamlining the contact directory. If your organization recently underwent a change in leadership, please don’t hesitate to reach out to ensure that we have updated contact details.

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