TITLE:
Balance of Concerns: Satisfactory Pre-Anesthetic Patient Education and the Extent of Patient Worries
AUTHORS:
Joerg Schnoor, Ulrike Reuter, Nils Engelmann, Ullrich Burkhardt
KEYWORDS:
Patient Worries; Patient Concerns; Preoperative Patient Assessment; Resilience; Anxiolysis
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Anesthesiology,
Vol.3 No.9,
November
21,
2013
ABSTRACT: Controversy
exists whether or not patient’s concerns regarding anesthetics can be reduced
by face-to-face pre-assessment with an anesthetist. Thus we were looking at
concerns patients had before and after such a consultation. Patient
satisfaction was rated by a validated questionnaire. A four-staged Likert-scale
was used to quantify the extent of patients concerns. The totaling 461 patients
were overall highly satisfied. 448 patients had “nil” to “minimal” concerns.
After the assessment, 106 patients stated their concerns had been lessened (p 0.001). Having gone through the
anesthetic pre-assessment center, 99.1% of all patients reported no
considerable concerns regarding anesthetics whatsoever. A high level of patient
satisfaction does not constitute a low level of concerns patients may hold over
anesthetics, although a pre-operative consultation mitigated these concerns by
23%, whilst for 9% of all patients this pre-assessment led to a higher level of
concerns.