Celebrating National Anaesthesia Day with Dr Darcy McFarland
Thursday, 16 October 2025 / Albury Wodonga Health
Each year on 16 October, we celebrate National Anaesthesia Day, marking the anniversary of the first public demonstration of ether anaesthetic in 1846.
For Dr Darcy McFarland, Anaesthetist at Albury Wodonga Health, the journey into medicine began close to home.
“I grew up in the region – I was born in Corryong and raised in the Upper Murray and Hume area,” he says. “After completing my medical degree at Melbourne University, I spent three years at the Rural Clinical School in Wangaratta. That’s where I developed an interest in anaesthetics.”
Dr McFarland joined AWH as an intern in 2017, staying for three years as a resident and part of the first Critical Care Senior Resident Medical Officer (SRMO) cohort. He went on to complete anaesthetic training in Canberra and Darwin, before returning to AWH as a consultant in February 2025.
He said his goal was always to come back to this region with his family to work and settle into their forever home.
“Being back in Albury Wodonga has been refreshing,” he said. “Training has meant moving every few years - from Melbourne to Wangaratta to Canberra and to Darwin - a difficult task with a young family.”
“It's great to be providing care to people back home, providing an essential service to the community. Most of the people I talk to in theatre I seem to either know personally or I know someone who knows them!”
Dr McFarland said the best part of his job is caring for complex, unwell patients.
“It’s satisfying to see a patient’s physiology on the monitor and use our medications and machines to tailor care to their needs and the needs of the surgery,” he said.
“There is the perception that we don't like talking to patients. However, some of the most rewarding parts of my job are helping patients who are very worried, very anxious, or very scared before their surgery to feel much more calm and at ease, and caring for them safely during the surgery.”
And those long-held myths about anaesthetists? “People still think we spend our days doing sudoku or crosswords. Though these days it’s more like Candy Crush or Angry Birds,” he laughs.
So, how does an anaesthetist spend their day?
Dr McFarland divides his time between clinical and non-clinical work, with an 80:20 split. His clinical days are spent mostly in theatre where he’s anaesthetising patients to have surgery. He’ll typically have a registrar with him to whom he teaches clinical procedures, physiology, pharmacology, and communication skills throughout the day.
Some of his clinical time is spent in the pre-admission clinic, assessing patients and making sure that they're prepared and ready for anaesthesia, and some of it is coordinating the theatres running in both Albury and Wodonga.
His non-clinical time is spent on safety and quality tasks, managing the morbidity and mortality meetings and reviewing outcomes to make our anaesthetics safer and safer.
This National Anaesthesia Day, we celebrate Dr McFarland and our anaesthetics team for the expertise, calm and compassion they bring to patients, every day.