The Aim of the Perioperative Management Team

Abstract

An increasing number of surgeries are being performed in elderly patients and patients with severe comorbidities, but the shortage of anesthesiologists continues, and since April 2024, physicians have also been subject to caps on overtime work. Under these circumstances, there are calls to promote task shifting and task sharing of physicians’ work. These initiatives should not be limited to the mere reallocation of physicians’ work, but rather should be promoted based on the concept of mutual complementation, where each profession proposes its own specialized role within the scope of its capabilities. Organizing a perioperative management team is not an easy task, but a realistic start would be to establish, for example, an “acute pain service” and then to gradually expand the scope of activities, aiming for a perioperative management team with no authority gradient.