Patient satisfaction with regional anesthesia and general anesthesia in upper limb surgeries:a comparative study

General anesthesia (GA) and regional anesthesia (RA) are the commonly practiced anesthetic procedures.  Two of the important factors in deciding the type of anesthesia to be administered are the involvement of patient or his caregivers in decision-making and the patient satisfaction. Patient satisfaction of the health care received is a multidimensional construct. It includes factors such as ease of the anesthetic procedure, adverse effects of anesthetic agents, emotional and interpersonal factors etc. Pascoe defined patient satisfaction as the patient’s reaction consisting of a “cognitive evaluation†and “emotional response†to the care they receive. Many of the sociodemographic factors, cultural influences and cognition of the patients are known to influence patient satisfaction.

In the upper limb surgeries PNB is the commonly practiced regional anesthesia procedure.  PNBs have been show to have clear edge over GA with respect to the many clinical variables. Advances in the PNBs have made them to be more acceptable among the patients, especially in North American and European countries.  In addition, RA has also been shown to have lesser cost compared with GA.

The more frequent administration of RA is very much required in the developing countries like India. More acceptability of RA by the patients would have significant economic implications on the cost of anesthetic procedures in a developing country like India.. In this context, it is quite essential to study the patient’s satisfaction with RA and GA and compare them. Such a study would also give an answer to the question of whether patient satisfaction differs between regional anesthesia and GA in the Indian population, in view of significant influence of psychosocial and cultural and factors in patient satisfaction. We could not come across any Indian study that has systematically evaluated and compared patient satisfaction between GA and RA

In this study we are assessing and comparing the patient satisfaction between RA and GA in subjects undergoing upper limb surgeries. In addition we would also compare the  length of stay in hospital between these two groups.