The Effect of Informational Videos on Preoperative Anxiety and Satisfaction Levels in Patients Undergoing Elective Ambulatory Surgery. A Case-control Clinical Trial

Anxiety is a common problem in patients undergoing invasive procedures, arriving in some studies up to 60-80%. Perioperative anxiety is correlated with hemodynamic effects (such as arterial hypertension and arrhythmias), it can have an impact on final surgical outcome, on anaesthetics drug dosage, and also with an growth about the perception of post-operative pain, leading to a substantial increase in analgesics dose and the number of post-operative hospitalization days. Finally, perioperative anxiety can reduce the patient's overall satisfaction with the quality of perioperative care.

Patients' satisfaction is largely based on their expectations and it forms part of the surgeon's reward: satisfied patients are more likely to maintain a good relationship with the surgeon, abstain from so called "doctor shopping", avoid malpractice litigations and recommend their surgeon to others. Last but not least, satisfied patients are more likely to comply with postoperative prescriptions and attend follow-up appointments. In non-life threatening procedures however, the main source of preoperative anxiety is often the outlook of anaesthesia rather than surgery itself, this being mainly related to a lack of enough information about the anaesthetic procedure. These fears are largely underestimated in routine minor procedures (such as ambulatory surgery) and thus risk to be not properly addressed. Due to lack of time and resources, this could have a significant impact on global patient satisfaction. Also if major complications (e.g. cardiac mortality) are surgery-related, anxiety is also associated with poor surgical outcome. How to identify and treat patients who will likely benefit from more information about anaesthesia is an important question that remains relatively unaddressed. However, it's known that more information about surgery reduces the level of anxiety and apprehension.

Some strategies have been developed to try to reduce pre-operative stress: deliver clinical information has proven to be able to relieve patient anxiety. Written information has recognised useful, but not all patients have shown the same degree of culture needed to read and understand texts. The use of multimedia information (such as videos) has already been studied and some trials have shown a certain anxiolytic effect, but data are conflicting. A part of this disparity probably derives from differences in methodology and culture between patients.

For these reasons the investigators developed a trial using a short educational video about the global management of local anaesthesia on outpatient hand surgery. The aim of this study is to assess the impact of this educational video about perioperative patient's anxiety levels.