Causes of Patient Dissatisfaction with Anesthetic Care

Oh, Se Hyuk; Kim, In Hak; Choi, So Ron; Chung, Chan Jong

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Patient satisfaction with anesthesia is an important outcome of hospital care. The aim of this study was to assess the overall level of satisfaction with anesthetic care and to identify predictive factors associated with dissatisfaction.
METHODS
Our subjects were adult in-patients with ASA 1-3 who had undergone an elective operation during the previous 12 months. The major measure of subjective outcome was the overall level of satisfaction with anesthetic care on the first day after operation. Patients were asked to rate if they were 'very satisfied', 'somewhat satisfied', 'neutral', 'somewhat dissatisfied' or 'very dissatisfied'. We also measured other predetermined outcomes, such as nausea, vomiting, pain and other complications.
RESULTS
At the time of analysis, our database contained information on 3376 patients. 283 (8.4%) patients were 'very satisfied', 1826 (54.1%) were 'somewhat satisfied', 1119 (33.1%) were 'neutral', 133 (3.9%) were 'somewhat dissatisfied' and 15 (0.4%) were 'very dissatisfied' with their anaesthetic care. The number of postanesthetic factors (81.7%) were greater than the number of preanesthetic factors (8.8%) and intranesthetic factors (9.5%) for dissatisfaction with anesthetic care. The causes of dissatisfaction were postoperative pain (43 patients, 29.1%), postoperative nausea and vomiting (17, 11.5%), sore throat (17, 11.5%), waiting a long time before surgery (9, 6.1%), myalgia (6, 4.1%), back pain (6, 4.1%) and other complications. Strong relations were found between patient dissatisfaction and an anesthetic duration of more than 2 hours, moderate or severe postoperative pain, moderate to severe postoperative nausea and vomiting, and other anesthesia-related adverse events.
CONCLUSIONS
This study found that patient satisfaction with anesthetic care is high and identified several factors associated with dissatisfaction that may be preventable or better managed.