How Much Surgical Patients At The King Khalid University Hospital (KKUH) Know About Their Anesthesia And Anesthesiologists?

摘要

Background: Patient awareness is one of the duties of the anesthesiologists in the operating theatres. However, it may be limited. Many studies proved lack of patient perception of the anesthesiologist's role in the surgical practice.Methods: One hundred and seventy operative patients were interviewed by anesthesiologists in the pre-surgical period at the King Khalid University Hospital in Riyadh KSA. This paper reports the results of this prospective study on these patient's interviews and filling predetermined questionnaire by the interviewer. The survey was conducted in two session namely before anesthesia and surgery and during the first post operative day and included three sections exploring the demographical profile of the participants, knowledge about anesthesia procedure, assessment, anesthesiologists personnel, postoperative pain relief and the attitude toward the service given to them.Results: Patients who recognized the anesthesiologist as specialized doctor were 55.3% and those who were recognizing he provided anesthesia services during surgical intervention were 16.5%. However there was scanty information perception regarding anesthesia procedures or anesthesiology during surgery and the role in resuscitation monitoring, postoperative analgesia. Patients showed inclination to know more about the anesthesia services and choices although they ranked the services from very good to excellent.Conclusions: A reasonable percentage of the patients knew that the anesthesiologist is a doctor who administers anesthesia. The services of anesthesiologists were highly appreciated but the duties during the operation theatres and nature of anesthetics were poorly known. Introduction Anesthesia in Saudi Arabia has evolved rapidly within the last few decades. The rapid development in social and cultural aspect in Saudi Arabia is fast. Although anesthesia evolved since more than 150 years in 1840s anesthesia practice was imported to Saudi Arabia through practitioners trained in Western or Eastern countries.The general feeling is that this specialty status is low profiled if compared with other medical and surgical specialties [1]. In other countries studies of similar kind showed that the public knowledge of anesthetic practice and attitude toward the specialty is limited [2,3,4,5]. British anesthesiologists were ranked second and third with regard to prestige and to academic qualifications, respectively [6]. In a more, in recent study, only 63% of the British patients knew that anesthesiologists were medical doctors [7]. Another study addressed the patient attitude and assessed patients' awareness of the medical and academic qualifications, duties and prestige of Finnish anesthesiologists [8]. Similar studies were conducted in Hong Kong, China, Japan Germany Canada, USA, Ireland, Australia and Pakistan [1,5, 9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18]. Patients attitude toward the service given to them were investigated after surgery in the postoperative first 24 hours. The previous experience of surgical treatment was monitored as well to distinguish any effects on the patient's response. No study to this date monitoring the Saudi patient's attitude toward anesthesia and amount of how much he knows about this specialty. Patients and Method After departmental research committee -King Khalid University Hospital- and after verbal consent and random selection using computer generated numbers a questionnaire was administered to patients scheduled for elective surgery in the surgical department of the King Khalid University Hospital in June 2004-May 2005. The patients admitted for emergency operations were excluded as well as those patients who were unable to verbally respond to the questionnaire independently. The questionnaire included three sections: Epidemiological data, assessment of patient knowledge of anesthesia, procedure and anesthesiologist activities in the perioperative period and patient's satisfaction with anesthesia services.The pati