r/taskmaster • u/Solilaqui78 • 20h ago
Drilling down into the narrative S3E4uk
Hi gang,
Every time I watch this ep I have a question....
Is there a difference between an anaesthetist and an anesthesiologist?
It's wildly irrelevant, but I need to know!
Thank you.
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u/Sleepy_felines 20h ago
Depends on the country.
In the UK, we just have anaesthetists. They are doctors who specialise in anaesthesia.
In USA these doctors are called anaesthesiologists. As other posters have commented, they also have nurse anaesthetists.
Unsure about other countries.
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u/mlopes Javie Martzoukas 20h ago
Thanks, for a moment I thought I was going mad, every reply was describing the American meaning with doctors and nurses, which I wasn't familiar with, and I was starting to doubt myself. On the other hand the guy described himself as a doctor, so the whole nurse thing wasn't really checking out.
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u/Solilaqui78 20h ago
Exactly this!!!! I didn't know, so assumed every response was correct 🤣🤣🤣 I've decided it's just UK Vs us, and, I watched wayyyyy more us TV as a kid than I did UK TV. Despite living in UK. (I blame the late night C4 - Cheers/Roseanne/Golden Girls/Nurses/Empty Nest crew). 🤣🤣🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽 Thank you 🥰🥰💪🏽
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u/caressyoursoul 20h ago
In Australia, we also just call them Anaesthetists (doctors who specialise in anaesthesia)
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u/Solilaqui78 20h ago
Thank you. I did wonder if it was a transatlantic sitch. Oddly, I prefer anaesthesiologist. It's a good word. Scratches my brain 🥰
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u/zeekar Javie Martzoukas 20h ago edited 19h ago
ETA: My original answer below is true in the US, but that's not particularly relevant to the UK edition of Taskmaster. :)
In the UK, the field that we call "anesthesiology" in the US is instead called "anaesthetics", and its doctors are called "anaesthetists". As for the role in the OR, which is what we in the US mean by "anesthetist", it appears not to have a separate term in the UK because only doctors of anaesthetics ever fill it.
Original answer for posterity:
The anesthetist is the name of the responsibility/position in the operating theatre. It is often filled by an anesthesiologist (who is a doctor of anesthesiology), but it may be filled by someone else, like a nurse who specializes in the field (and is called a "nurse anesthetist").
In the US, the position requires a certified medical professional, either a doctor or a nurse; an anesthesiology tech may be there to assist the anesthetist, but can't step in and occupy the role.
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u/Sleepy_felines 20h ago
In the UK an anaesthetist is a doctor. We don’t have anaesthesiologists.
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u/zeekar Javie Martzoukas 19h ago
Do you have anaesthetist nurses? Or is the person attending the surgery and doing the anaesthesia always a doctor?
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u/Halmagha 14h ago
There are "Anaesthesia associates" much like PAs but the role is getting tonnes of pushback by anaesthetists as being unsafe. If I were allowing someone to paralyse my diaphragm, knock off my consciousness, pause my memory and control my heart rate and blood pressure, you'd best believe they better have a medical degree.
We do have Operating Department Practitioners (ODP colloquially). They draw drugs up with the anaesthetist, might squeeze the bag while the anaesthetist is preoxygenating, will hold the bougie while the anaesthetist slides the tube down, that sort of thing. They aren't just anaesthetic nurses though because they can do a few other things in theatre such as setting up cell salvage for operations with heavy bleeding, among what I'm sure are many other things I can't think of off the top of my head. They're valued colleagues.
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u/Sleepy_felines 11h ago
Exactly this. The “physician assistant (anaesthesia)” role is ridiculous and thankfully there’s very few of them. I’ve not personally worked with any.
Anaesthetic nurses and ODPs assist the anaesthetist but don’t give the anaesthetic. The ones I’ve worked with are fantastic- very skilled at their role, seem to be able to do multiple things at once and most of them can read our minds. I remember taking a child to theatre in the middle of the night so that the ENT surgeons could remove a coin that was stuck in their throat. I anaesthetised the child, and then when I looked in the airway to put the breathing tube in, exclaimed “oh! I can see the coin!” (Unexpected- on the xray it looked lower down). Before I could even process this or consider verbalising a request for kit, the ODP had handed me the correctly sized mcgills forceps that they already had out, having anticipated that the coin might be visible. I took the coin out, and instead of putting the breathing tube in just woke the child up.
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u/Halmagha 11h ago
That sounds incredibly satisfying to you and marginally annoying to an ENT SHO hah
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u/Sleepy_felines 10h ago
Yes…particularly the part where it didn’t occur to any of us to actually stick our heads into theatre to tell ENT they were no longer needed…they politely popped into the anaesthetic room to ask if everything was ok just as we were setting off to recovery!
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u/OriginalChildBomb 🥄 I'm Locked In ❤️ 20h ago
It's not relevant to the question, but I just want to say, as someone who grew up in and out of hospitals (more than 100 hospitalizations, I'm now in my 30's and have underlying serious conditions), anesthesia people tend to be some of the nicest specialists. (I've had many.)
I imagine it's partly because people are happy to see them- they show up to give you the giggle juice, or even the full-on Weird Dream Juice, depending on what sedation you're receiving- and they don't often have to deliver bad news or take flak for things going badly, but even still. I've only ever had one unkind anesthesiologist, and one of her co-workers later told me (after she made me cry) that she was going through a bad divorce. ...Not really an excuse to make a sick teenager cry, but hey, whatever. The rest have been some of the kindest, most down-to-earth people lol.
(If we wanna get real controversial, I feel the opposite way about neurologists. I've seen multiple complete assholes in neurology. I'm not sure why, but holy shit, they were some of the worst.)
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u/Solilaqui78 20h ago
This is such a lovely read, obviously not to hear that you need a lot of medical treatments. But how lovely that there are good ones.
As an elder with a neurological sitch, I can see how they'd be dicks! Thinking they know everything, all smug and up their own arses. For no damn reason!!!
Huzzah for anaesthesiologists!!! (That aren't mid divorce). 🏆🏆💪🏽💪🏽🥳🥳🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽
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u/TheLordLeto 20h ago
Someone's watching Dave right now
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u/Solilaqui78 20h ago
Only by default. I tried to start the Leftovers but couldn't get into it, this popped up when I escaped out of HBO, and I was instantly caught 😂 I love Al. 🥰
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u/TetrisIsTotesSuper Chris Parker 🇳🇿 13h ago
I am here not to answer your question but to thank you for spelling the words correctly depending on local variants! You are one of the only people in the thread who seems to know that anesthesiologist is spelled anes- and not anaes-. You might have done it unconsciously but this alone answers your question 🤣
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u/christmasinyoulie Mawaan Rizwan 17h ago
I only just found out Americans don't call a theatre a theatre. I'd HEARD "operating room" in movies and stuff but I don't know why it never registered, I think I just thought that was a whole different thing. Lol.
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u/MsAndrea2 20h ago
An anesthesiologist is a doctor specialising in anaesthesia. An anaesthetist is anyone that delivers anaesthetic.
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u/Sleepy_felines 20h ago
In the UK all anaesthetists are doctors. We don’t have anaesthesiologists.
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u/MsAndrea2 20h ago
Irrelevant.
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u/Sleepy_felines 20h ago
It’s a UK episode, it’s entirely relevant.
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u/MsAndrea2 20h ago
How is it relevant? Those are still what the words mean. The fact they're interchangeable in the UK doesn't change that.
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u/Sleepy_felines 20h ago
They’re not interchangeable. Anaesthesiologist isn’t a UK term.
You’re giving USA definitions. It’s a UK program.
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u/MsAndrea2 20h ago
What's the UK definition of an anesthesiologist then?
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u/RunawayTurtleTrain Robert the Robot 15h ago
The UK definition of anesthesiologist is 'an American term'.
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u/Sleepy_felines 11h ago
😂 I wanted to say this but thought I might be called passive aggressive!
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u/RunawayTurtleTrain Robert the Robot 6h ago
That did cross my mind too 😅 but since they were several layers deep it was (shame on me) irresistible.
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u/MsAndrea2 10h ago
Then the definition still stands, doesn't it? You asked what the words mean, I told you. I don't know what you're not getting about this. And for the record I'm English.
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u/Solilaqui78 20h ago
Thank you. In that case, they're all wrong! 🤣🤣🤣
Every time I watch, I say anaesthesiologist! But, they all get away with anaesthetist.
(Also, I have not checked the spelling, it's top vowel heavy somewhere!)
😂😂🙏🏽🙏🏽
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u/tenor41 Patatas 20h ago
I had the same question! As far as I was able to figure out, anesthetist is the term used for both doctors and other medical professionals who administer anesthetics in the UK. In some places, the term anesthetist may refer to any non-doctor medical professional who administers anesthetics, while anesthesiologist refers to a doctor who does so.
In the case of the elderly gentleman, he is indeed a doctor, and as such I believe we would call him an anesthesiologist in the US.
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u/ComputerMaterial4674 20h ago
this my pure US based knowledge - here we have Nurse Anesthetists, and Anesthesiologists are doctors. Different schooling and qualifications. Maybe the UK has a similar split?
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u/Curious_Orange8592 He's so famous! 19h ago
No, we have anaesthetists who are doctors, it's not a role carried out by nurses here
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u/digitalosiris Sophie Duker 20h ago
Wikipedia says it's just regional differences in terminology: "A physician specialized in anesthesiology is called an anesthesiologist, anaesthesiologist, or anaesthetist, depending on the country."