Academic Anesthesia Faculty Salaries: Incentives, and Productivity
In the United States, financial compensation for academic anesthesiologists has usually been based on rank and/or clinical time. Typically, faculty salaries would increase with seniority and the associated increases in rank (i.e., assistant professor associate professor full professor). Since most of the actual financial compensation is derived from clinical activity, a certain clinical expectation (i.e., usually number of days per week in the operating room plus call) would be expected. If a faculty member has research grants, money from the grant may be used to help pay a faculty member’s salary and increase his or her nonclinical time. These are the principles by which academic departments have for years compensated their faculty, although there have undoubtedly been many variations. Over the past 10 to 15 years, many American academic anesthesia departments have increasingly had problems with recruiting and retaining faculty (especially junior faculty), making it difficult to provide clinical coverage for all of the...