Assessment of Baseline anxiety and Effect of Nursing Intervention on Post-Operative Anxiety among Surgical Patients of Obafemi Awolowo University Teaching Hospitals Complex, Ile Ife, Nigeria

Abstract

Surgical patients perceived the day of surgery as highly terrifying in their lives. Patients manifest different levels of anxiety states in relation to what is expected in future and these are associated with many factors which may be type and extent of the proposed surgery, gender, age, previous surgical experiences, and personal tendency for unpleasant events. The study aimed to assess baseline anxiety and effect of nursing intervention on post-operative anxiety states among surgical patients. Two-group pre-test, post-test quasi-experimental study was adopted and thirty surgical patients were included. Sample size was determined using Leslie Kish formula and purposive sampling technique was adopted to select 15 surgical patients in to the experimental and control groups respectively. The intervention group had structured nursing information but control group did not. Data was processed using statistical package for social science version 21. Two research questions were answered using descriptive statistics of percentages and one hypothesis was tested using inferential statistics of student t-test at 0.05 level of significance. This study shows that anxiety states are common to all surgical patients. The surgical patients (in both experimental and control groups) (33%) experienced high anxiety state preoperatively. The percentage reduction in the number of respondents that expressed high level of anxiety state in the experimental group (40% reduced to 26.7%) as they move from preoperative to postoperative periods as compared with the control group (26.7% increased to 33.3%). This shows the relative impart of the nursing intervention, but the mean differences of anxiety of the experimental group was 0.08; while that of the control group was 0.15 respectively. Result reveals no significant difference in anxiety level among participants in the experimental and control groups (p=0.514). Surgical patients should be assessed of anxiety states in the perioperative environment. The information needed and provided to each surgical patient should be assessed and patient-centered to prevent failure of preoperative information.