An assessment of the patient’s understanding and knowledge of the relevance of pre-anesthetic check-up

• Published in: Panacea journal of medical sciences Vol. 13; no. 1; pp. 82 - 87
• Main Authors: Asthana, Unnati, Anshumali, Sharma, Shruti
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 28.04.2023
• ISSN: 2249-8176; 2348-7682
• DOI: 10.18231/j.pjms.2023.018

Pre anesthetic checkup is an important prerequisite of any surgery. Therefore the importance of a detailed pre anesthetic check-up including a thorough history and clinical examination should be known to all the patients undergoing any kind of surgery. It can be gauged by the fact that missing out even a single event like a previous drug reaction may jeopardize a precious life. The aim of our study was to assess the understanding of the importance of a pre-anesthetic check-up (PAC) and its components amongst the population coming for elective surgeries in a tertiary care hospital in Urban India. : A prospective randomized observational study was conducted including 450 patients (18-60yrs) coming to a tertiary hospital in a metropolitan city over a period of three months. Each patient was asked to fill out a questionnaire consisting of 16 questions in Hindi (local language)/ English in the waiting area. Every question had multiple possible choices and they had to choose one most appropriate answer according to them. Every correct answer was marked 1 while an incorrect answer was given a score of 0. The data was expressed as percentage and frequency. The correlation tests were applied using the appropriate tests according to the latest SPSS version and included the unpaired t-tests and one way analysis of variance. Out of the 450 patients, only 21.2% had the knowledge of a pre anesthetic clinic. It was also observed that only 19.4% were aware that risk assessment is done in pre anesthetic checkup for undergoing proposed surgery. 54.6% did not know about the importance of optimization before surgery. 99.2% desired to receive information about anesthesia before experiencing. Despite the improved literacy rate, there is a dearth of knowledge about the importance of the pre-anesthetic checkup (PAC) clinic visit before an elective surgery and the role of an anesthesiologist in the perioperative period