[Evaluation of patient satisfaction with anesthesia care]

ABSTRACT

The assessment of patient satisfaction with anesthesia, the balance between expectations and perception of what was received, is an essential component of continuous quality improvement in anesthesiology. In our center there have been few studies conducted in the anesthesia field, which have assessed patient's satisfaction. In this prospective study we have evaluated patient satisfaction with anesthesia in patients 24 h after surgery. This study was performed in Sina hospital in Tehran, Iran on patients aged more than 18 yr. They all underwent elective surgical procedures with anesthesia. One of the anesthesia staff members took the interview one day after surgery and asked the patients questions for the structured questionnaire designed to measure patient satisfaction with anesthesia. At the same time, some specific questions were also asked to find factors that could be associated with such satisfaction. The data was gathered from 500 patients [mean age 41 +/- 16 yr; and males 65.2%]. The overall satisfaction [complete and relative] was high [98.8%]; although 6 patients [1.2%] were dissatisfied with their anesthesia care. After analysis of several factors related to the patients' surgery and anesthesia, a strong relation was found between spinal anesthesia and satisfaction [p=0.003].There was not any relation between age, gender, education, duration of anesthesia and kind of surgery with patients' satisfaction. Our study found that patient satisfaction with anesthesia was very high in our center and the only factor that increased patient's satisfaction was spinal anesthesia