Dr. Kan Ma is the Clinical Lead for Neuroanesthesia and Associate Fellowship Director, Trauma–Neuroanesthesia and Critical Care Fellowships at St. Michael’s Hospital, and an Assistant Professor at University of Toronto. He completed his residency at McMaster University in 2017, a Trauma–Neuroanesthesia and Critical Care Fellowship at St. Michael’s in 2018 and a Neurosurgical Anesthesiology Fellowship at Northwestern University in 2019. Dr. Ma has received multiple resident teaching awards and serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Clinical Anesthesia. He is also a Member-at-Large for the CAS Annual Meeting Scientific Planning Committee and its Exam Preparation Subcommittee.
In this interview, Dr. Ma unpacks a life-altering event that led him to become an anesthesiologist, the impact of starting practice during the first COVID-19 lockdown, and the ramifications of the pandemic six years later. He details the changes he’s seeing in anesthesia residency programs since graduating, how his mentors have inspired him, and why anesthesiologists should embrace a level of discomfort to give patients the best possible care.
Interview conducted by Calvin Barr, Public Relations & Marketing Coordinator, CAS, August 2026.
Calvin: Tell me about a typical workday. How is your time broken up between clinical anesthesia care, teaching, administration, and any other responsibilities?
Dr. Ma: On a given week, I spend 60 to 70% of my time on clinical work and roughly 30% on teaching, research, and administrative work. I'm based at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, which is a tertiary care facility—meaning that we provide specialized care to patients referred from their family doctor or another specialist.
Even though clinical work tends to take up most of my days, teaching—which includes medical students, residents, fellows, Anesthesia Assistant trainees, etc.—is often my most demanding role. Ensuring trainees are learning effectively in a safe and supportive environment invariably impacts both their own wellbeing and their future patients’. So, it’s a role I take very seriously, and one where I’m learning as much as I am teaching.
Calvin: How many hours per week are you typically at work or on-call versus at home?
Dr. Ma: On an average week, I’m on the clock for 50 to 60 hours, depending on if there's any call component. I usually put in roughly 7-10 additional hours towards attending rounds, meetings, or academia and teaching activities.
Calvin: What made you choose anesthesiology as your specialty?
Dr. Ma: When I was six years old, I had to undergo a surgery, which ended up being quite traumatizing. I vividly remember panicking so much that I jumped off the operating table and ran out of the operating room (OR). A nurse had to forcibly carry me back into the room, where the staff had to restrain me on the table to administer general anesthesia with a mask—you can imagine the impact of that experience.
For an anesthesiologist, the job goes beyond keeping our patients unconscious or ensuring their vital functions remain stable. It’s also being the person responsible for making them feel safe through an extremely vulnerable life event. To me, that means discussing their medical care honestly and empathetically, while providing reassurance that I will be there taking care of them every step of the way. Now as a physician, I feel uniquely qualified to centre the care I provide around my patients’ physical and psychological sense of safety.
Calvin: Did you go into medical school thinking that anesthesiology was going to be your specialty, or did you consider other options first?
Dr. Ma: In medical school, students rotate through various medical and surgical subspecialties. When I was in my second year at McMaster, I had excellent mentors and supervisors who influenced my decision. I think that's true for many physicians—we find a role model who helps incite our passion for a particular path in medicine.
Calvin: What made you pursue neuroanesthesia? What do you feel makes it unique as a subspecialty?
Dr. Ma: Again, I had two mentors during residency, whose primary practices were neuroanesthesia, and they motivated me to pursue it. I really enjoy neurophysiology as a field of study, and the impact I can have on patients who have experienced a traumatic brain injury. When a patient comes into the hospital after an accident that resulted in a serious blow to the head, a neuroanesthesiologist is essential to preventing their primary injury from deteriorating into a more life-threatening condition
I also really appreciate the level of collaboration I’ve experienced within neurosurgical perioperative care teams. There's a shared understanding that none of us can single-handedly alter our patient’s outcome—surgeons, anesthesiologists, OR and postoperative care nurses, and intensive care teams are all needed to make that happen.
Calvin: You finished your fellowships at the end of 2019. What was transitioning into practice at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic like for you?
Dr. Ma: It feels like a lifetime ago, even though it’s only been six years. To be honest, it was absolutely terrifying. I returned from my fellowship in January 2020, and I still remember being called to a department meeting in March 2020 to be informed that COVID-19 had been declared a pandemic. At that moment, we all realized that our personal risk as healthcare workers had changed drastically. My first thought was protecting my elderly parents, so I moved into a small apartment—which meant minimal contact with friends and family while I was going to work every day in survival mode. Looking back on it now, COVID-19 was weatherable, but at the time, just keeping our heads above water every day was a struggle.
Calvin: At that time, anesthesiologists’ airway expertise was vital to COVID patient care. Even though you had fewer non-urgent surgeries, did you feel overwhelmed by the volume of patients who needed critical care?
Dr. Ma: We certainly saw an uptick of critically ill patients related to COVID-19. But, at least in Canada, we didn’t see the true impact of the pandemic until two or three years later when the backlog of procedures started to pour in rapidly. Today, we are dealing with the repercussions. Our patients are sicker and presenting with more advanced diseases—partially because they suffer from chronic conditions and weren’t able to have their symptoms fully addressed during lockdown.
In many cases, we’re seeing people who should have had screenings to detect conditions like cancer, high blood pressure, or neurodegenerative diseases as soon as symptoms started showing. But over two years, a relatively minor disease can advance to the point that quality of life or the chance of recovery is significantly lower. It’s difficult to reconcile with the fact that so many patients I’m seeing today don’t have COVID-19, but still require complex and often aggressive treatments, because of lockdown.
Calvin: Increasing patient wait times and burnout among healthcare workers is an ongoing issue in Canada. Has burnout impacted you?
Dr. Ma: Personally, I'm very fortunate to have a great support system in my wife and two young kids—they really keep me in check. But I definitely see signs and symptoms of burnout in my colleagues or reports of it on the news. Again, this is tied to the number of our patients who’ve had appointments or procedures delayed, or require more invasive treatment, because they’re getting sicker or older. It does feel like we're always playing “catch up,” and that providing care has generally become more challenging.
Calvin: How is being an anesthesiologist in a densely populated city like Toronto different from practicing in a smaller or more rural community?
Dr. Ma: I haven’t spent a lot of time practicing outside of Southwestern Ontario, but I think that people in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) generally receive high-quality care quite quickly. When I was doing a temporary placement in Kelowna, British Columbia a few years ago, I remember a patient I saw nine months after she’d had a stroke. We were trying to fix her carotid artery to prevent another one. She told me that after her first stroke, she’d waited three months to see a family doctor, another three months to see a neurologist, and then three more to see a neurosurgeon. Meanwhile, a patient in the GTA would likely have been treated within two weeks of that first stroke. Unfortunately, we do see patients in Canada experience unequal access to some care, because of the uneven distribution of healthcare resources and specialists across different provinces and territories.
Calvin: What do you enjoy most about your job?
Dr. Ma: As a specialty, anesthesia comes with a lot of flexibility. Not having a set roster of patients every day sometimes allows us to shift our to-do lists around, or practice in multiple places. I also genuinely enjoy my patient interactions. There's a running joke that anesthesiologists choose this specialty so that they don't have to talk to people. But I really enjoy the preoperative period when I get to connect with the person that I'll be providing care for in the next few hours.
Calvin: What do you find most difficult about it?
Dr. Ma: Even though I’m hopefully doing an excellent job, understanding and accepting that you can only do so much for your patient is consistently hard. Surgery is often just a fraction of someone’s recovery or treatment journey, and there are potentially so many unpredictable roadblocks ahead for them. I think most physicians are Type A—we want to control everything—but 95% of what our patients go through on their journeys of recovery is out of our hands. That’s a harsh reality at times.
Calvin: You’ve been very involved in resident education as an Assistant Professor and a CAS volunteer. Do you feel resident training has changed since you graduated?
Dr. Ma: I think two aspects have changed quite a bit. Anesthesia residency has become more challenging in the sense that there’s a lot more to learn as the specialty evolves. At the same time, programs are starting to take physician burnout more seriously and recognize that residents need strong resources to deal with fear, stress, uncertainty—the things that make us all human. I think doctors have historically been bad at asking for support when we need it. But today, a paradigm shift that encourages work-life balance is showing up not just in residents, but in seasoned physicians as well—which is very encouraging.
Calvin: You’ve been instrumental in starting Ace It! A Prep Course for the Royal College Exam. What made you want to get involved with the project?
Dr. Ma: I had the opportunity to work with Dr. Jason Chui, who was the Chair of the CAS Annual Meeting Scientific Planning Committee at the time. I consider him a strong mentor, and he inspired me to help organize the course. I remembered attending a similar prep course from my residency, in which different anesthesia specialists provided didactic guest lectures. Dr. Chui was one of those lecturers when I was a resident. It really helped me build my confidence before my exams, and when I went into a teaching role, Ace It! felt like my opportunity to give back. I hope we're delivering an experience that empowers residents with greater peace of mind before their exams.
Calvin: That leads right into my next question: Who are your mentors, and how have they influenced your professional development?
Dr. Ma: I've had five very important mentors at different stages of my career. During my residency at McMaster, I had the opportunity to work with Dr. Andrea Dower, Dr. Karen Raymer, and Dr. Liz Ling—all of whom are academic anesthesiologists with a passion for education. I look up to them as very caring clinicians who are always calm and collected.
During my fellowship training, I met Dr. John Bebawy at Northwestern University and Dr. Andrea Rigamonti, who was my fellowship director at St. Michael's Hospital, and is now the Chief of Critical Care. They both provided me with so much invaluable career advice, and I continue to have a mentor-mentee relationship with them. I’ve been very lucky, and I hope that some of my trainees will say that I had a positive impact on their training and career one day.
Calvin: Speaking of making a positive impact, what advice would you give to those considering or actively pursuing anesthesiology as a career?
Dr. Ma: That's a difficult one. I think that when we start our training, we're very focused on the technical and medical aspects of anesthesiology—and those are integral to our practice and can also be very stimulating. But it’s imperative that whether we’re on our first or seventh surgery of the day, we always see our patients as humans we’re caring for, not a disease we’re trying to fix. This is someone’s parent, spouse, sibling, friend, or child, and sometimes through the complexity of the case, or the stress we carry at work, we forget that and become detached. Even when guiding patients through their fear and anxiety is uncomfortable, it’s our job to make them feel safe, respected, and reassured in these moments. I hope that any of my trainees who read this remember that.
Calvin: Can you share the most positive or impactful experience you’ve had with a patient?
Dr. Ma: I remember a young woman who had metastatic brain cancer in a delicate area of the brain that controls speech. She had to undergo an awake craniotomy to remove a brain tumour, which meant that we had to test her ability to speak during the procedure. The surgery itself would not amount to a cure for her cancer, but it would potentially prolong and improve her quality of life. I remember having a conversation with her before the operation and hearing her fears about losing her ability to speak or move, and how she didn’t want to be a burden to her family during her last years. Meeting patients like her helps keep me grounded and reminds me that what I do can mean so much to someone and their family and friends.
Calvin: Was the outcome of her procedure successful?
Dr. Ma: The procedure went as well as we could hope for, and she went home safely. I did follow up and learned that she didn’t have any lasting complications resulting from the surgery either. But again, we generally don’t know what happens once a patient is out of our care—in this case, she will likely succumb to her disease eventually. But I hope that at the very least I was able to give her more time to be with her loved ones with better quality of life.
Calvin: That's wonderful. And, finally, if you weren't an anesthesiologist, what do you think you would be doing instead for a career?
Dr. Ma: I'd probably be a chef because I love to eat and watch cooking shows. In a way, chef competitions are a bit like anesthesia. You need to be patient, have a lot of technical knowledge, and pay close attention to many details all at once. But, on the other hand, my wife would say that I'm a terrible cook, so I like to think that I ultimately made the right career decision!