Assessing the Knowledge of Patients Undergoing Elective Surgeries about Anesthesiology

Anesthesiology as a specialty has made a lot of progress during the last few decades. anesthesiology is not just an attempt to reduce pain during surgery, and anesthesiologists play a very important role in post-operative care, intensive care, labor analgesia, and pain clinics. However, studies have shown that most patients think that the anesthesiologist is the surgeon's assistant who puts the patient to sleep and wakes the patient up after the completion of the surgical procedure and they don't know about the comprehensive medical care that is provided before and after the surgery and even beyond that, that is provided by an anesthesiologist. The present study was conducted to evaluate patients who are candidates for surgery in relation to anesthesia and the different roles of anesthesiologists in the hospitals of Iran University of Medical Sciences in 1399-1400.

Method and Materials:

This study is a cross-sectional-descriptive survey on adult non-emergency surgery candidates in Rasool Akram and Firouzgar hospitals of Iran University of Medical Sciences. Data collection was done using a checklist that is provided to patients during the pre-surgery visit. Sampling in this research is done by a simple non-probability method.  The collected data are analyzed using SPSS statistical software.

In this study, 250 patients were included in the study. Age group with most of the patients were between the ages 40 to 50. 49.6% of patients were men and 50.4% were women. most of the participants had bachelor's and master's degrees, which constituted 38.8% of the patients, and 22% of the participants in this study worked in the healthcare sector. the patients of this study were divided into three groups living in the village, city, and metropolis, which included 18%, 35.2%, and 46.8%, respectively. 22.8% mentioned a previous history of surgery or anesthesia. In this study, 49.6%, 21.2%, and 35.6% were aware of the role of the anesthesiologist in pre-surgery, during surgery, and post-surgery procedures, respectively. Also, only 18.8% had sufficient information about the anesthesiologist's role in pain clinics, 13.2% of the anesthesiologist's role in labor analgesia, and 20.8% of the role of the anesthesiologist in the intensive care unit. In this study, the highest level of awareness of anesthesiology and the role of anesthesiologists was seen in the group with doctoral education and above. Also, the highest level of awareness was in the age group of 50 to 60 years. The level of knowledge about the role of anesthesiologists was higher in people who had a history of anesthesia than in people without a history of anesthesia

According to the results of our study, the level of awareness of patients who are candidates for surgery regarding the role of anesthesiologists in their treatment process and the general awareness of these patients to the different roles of anesthesiologists is low. Also, our study showed that people with older age and more education have more knowledge about anesthesia and anesthesiologist's roles in the hospital and in treating patients. However, planning to educate people to make them aware of the abilities of anesthesiologists can help in receiving appropriate healthcare services.