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Anaesthetists should be supported in maintaining the scope of their clinical practice as required for their clinical role, including their out of hours and flexible clinical commitments.^{24, 25, 26}

Anaesthetists with commitments to regional and national work should have appropriate support through job planning. Departments should take into consideration both the impact this has on the rest of the department, as well as the considerable benefits local departments gain from having staff undertake anaesthetic regional and national roles.

All anaesthetists should complete training in adult and paediatric life support, safeguarding and consent, appropriate to their clinical practice and case load (emergency as well as elective). Knowledge and skills in these domains should be maintained through CPD and planned as part of annual appraisal and personal development plans (PDP).

Anaesthetists in training may be given the opportunity to train in ophthalmic Anaesthesia as a special interest area of the RCoA 2021 Curriculum if the hospital caseload and capacity for training meet the requirements for this special interest area.^39,40

Many procedures do not have to be performed out of hours.³⁵Anaesthetists and surgeons together should devise departmental protocols for the handling of patients requiring urgent procedures, to allow prioritisation from both surgical and anaesthetic perspectives.

When using the block room model, where work occurs in parallel, the anaesthetist should be immediately available for the first 15 minutes after siting the block and then immediately contactable and able to attend within 2 minutes for the duration of the procedure.¹⁶

Anaesthetists and other health professionals who care for children having regional anaesthesia techniques, must have received appropriate training and should ensure that at annual appraisals, competence is deemed adequate.^45,51