PAIN CONTROL AND STRESS MANAGEMENT FOR PATIENTS UNDERGOING SURGERY

Introduction and Objective: Surgery brings patients psychological stress and physical pain, which not only increase medical costs but also threaten medical quality. There also exists potential medical negligence with or without legal problem. As a pain-free hospital, it is necessary to lower perceived stress preoperatively, ease anesthetic pain perioperatively, and relieve wound pain postoperatively. Since the ladder of pain management is well applied, we conduct a study to identify what factors induce operation related stress and pain so as to cope with them. Method: Those undergoing spinal anesthesia were included. Prior to operations, the patients reported stress sources like unfriendly environment, unfamiliarity with how to and where to anesthetize, terrible experience in the past, etc. Later, the anesthesiologists paid visits to make acquaintance with patients prior to operation. During interactions, the doctors explained how to and where to anesthetize so as to lower the stress. Finally, we compared the satisfactions before and after program. Results and Conclusions: Before pain control program, there were 944 patients with 1053 spinal anesthetic injections. After improvement program, there were 193 patients with 198 injections. We also lower the patient’s fear to have an injection from 17.39% to 3.55%. The overall satisfaction was promoted from 3.7 to 4.5 on the 5-point Likert scale. A significant proportion of patients undergoing spinal anesthesia experienced less stress preoperatively and pain perioperatively, respectively. They reported satisfaction with both preoperative visits and perioperative process. In general, when pain and stress are reduced effectively, better medical quality and decreased cost would be available.