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Departments should review the responsibilities of anaesthetists as part of job planning.  This includes out of hours commitments and the scope of the individual’s practice, as well as any additional roles and responsibilities.^{17, 24, 25}

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 should be provided with adequate time in their job plans, resources and support to help them to complete annual appraisals and achieve revalidation.^5,13

Where possible departments should empower employees to make decisions concerning their jobs, regarding task variety and options to develop and learn new tasks.

Job reviews should take into consideration individual risk assessments for anaesthetists in the context of environmental threats, ill health, pregnancy and breastfeeding, menopause, fatigue, and the impacts of ageing. Where relevant advice from an accredited specialist in occupational medicine should be sought.²⁷

Job plans and rotas should be constructed to ensure reasonable rest periods and should be regularly reviewed taking into consideration out of hours work frequency, duration of out of hour’s periods and availability of recovery time after being on call.

Where ‘group job plans ’are the norm, there may be specific requirements for individual variation including susceptibility to fatigue. This includes consideration of work intensity before and after out of hours commitments and discussion of strategies to minimise impact.^27,28

Feedback should be sought from departmental members about working patterns and their effects on health and wellbeing and adjustments made where working patterns are problematic.

Departments should encourage flexibility when reviewing job plans to support the changing needs of colleagues over the course of their career. Colleagues should be supported in tailoring their career over time. The impact of change on the rest of the department should be considered.²⁷

Anaesthetists appointed to organisation wide, non-clinical roles should be adequately supported with sufficient time and resources to undertake the role.