Impact of Pre Anesthesia Counseling on Patient Anxiety Before Scheduled Surgery

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Pre-operative anxiety is one of the major concerns among patients scheduled for elective surgery. It has drastic impact on patient hemodynamics, analgesics requirements, and anesthesia as well as on the surgery. Pre-operative anxiety mainly occurs due to lack of education and uncertainty. The study aims to assess the impact of counseling in reducing patient pre-operative anxiety levels and to ensure patient counseling in pre-operative anesthesia visit. In this cross-sectional interventional study 196 patients were included, scheduled for elective surgeries and were assessed by using the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), the raw scores obtained were converted to their respective T scores as per normative scoring. Individuals aged between 18 to 60, ASA I, ASA II and those presented for elective surgeries were included, excluding ones with cognitive dysfunction, refusal. Data was analyzed utilizing Paired T test for assessing the impact and mean score difference after counseling. Chi square was implemented to assess association of demographics with alleviation of anxiety. According to this study mean value of normative score for state anxiety after counseling was 13.62±2.78 while for trait anxiety, it was 15.12 ±4.81 result, with mean difference, 7.56±2.11 for state, and 1.46 ± 1.80 for trait Anxiety, as per normative scores before and after counseling suggested that state anxiety has improved in majority (87.75%), while trait was only improved in 3.57% patients. The results were highly significant as per paired T test with p-value of < 0.001 for both trait and state mean score differences indicating the counseling has alleviated anxiety of the patients and normative scores have dropped greatly, decreasing patients’ stat anxiety more compared to trait anxiety. It was concluded that the counseling adopted in this study has greater impact in reducing state anxiety as compared to trait anxiety, as this counseling only provided education information relieves uncertainty among the patients in their current state