Effectiveness of multimedia pre-anesthetic information on pre-operative anxiety in patients undergoing surgery

Abstract

The quasi-experimental, two-group, pre- and post-assessment, experimental research aimed to compare pre-operative anxiety of patients undergoing surgery with general and spinal anesthesia  between patients in an experimental group who receiving via the multimedia pre-anesthesia information method i and a control group who received their pre-anesthesia information from a Nurse Anesthetist. A sample of 40 surgical patients at Waengyai Hospital was recruited in to the study with 20 patients placed in each group. The two groups received the same pre-anesthesia information, but v different methods, The multimedia pre-anesthesia information presentation was developed based on the pre-anesthesia information and had a Cronbarch's alpha of 0.933, an item-total correlation of 0.633, and an intra classification coefficient of 0.998. The research instruments were the Thai version of the Amsterdam preoperative anxiety and information scale (APAIS), which had Cronbach's alpha of 0.88, and the pre-anesthetic knowledge test, which had a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.911, an Intraclass correlation of 0.733, and an Item-Item Correlation of 0.778. This research analyzed demographics using descriptive statistics and the APAIS and knowledge within and between groups using t-tests and two-way ANOVA tests.  

      The result revealed that, after the pre-anesthesia information was provided, the experimental and control groups had statistically significantly lower pre-operative anxiety at p<.001, but, when compared, no statistical difference between groups was seen. However, the pre- operative anxiety scores among those who had high levels of anxiety in the experimental group had decreased statistical significantly at p<.05 more than the ones in the control group. There was no statistically significant difference in the participants’ knowledge scores. Therefore, the new multimedia pre-anesthesia information presentation can be used as an alternative approach for providing anesthesia nursing information as it was effective at reducing the anxiety of patients with high levels of pre-operative anxiety.