Balance of Concerns: Satisfactory Pre-Anesthetic Patient Education and the Extent of Patient Worries

Joerg Schnoor, Ulrike Reuter, Nils Engelmann, Ullrich Burkhardt

Department of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine, University Hospital Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany.

DOI: 10.4236/ojanes.2013.39085                

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.

Keywords

Patient Worries; Patient Concerns; Preoperative Patient Assessment; Resilience; Anxiolysis

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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