Role of Pre-operative Counseling in the Surgical Patient

Overview

The study will seek to determine if surgical patients do better or the same if participants undergo pre-operative counseling for elective laparoscopic same day surgery. The study hypothesizes that patients who receive a pre-operative education booklet and a phone call from a surgical registered nurse, compared to the current standard of care, will have higher satisfaction with regard to participants' surgical experience, decrease in the number of post-operative phone calls, decrease in the number of opioid medications, and decrease in the number of emergency department visits. The importance of this study is to understand what surgical clinical practices can do in the pre-operative setting to enhance a surgical patient's recovery.

In the last decade there has been an increasing focus on the patient's pre-operative, operative and post operative experience to help patient's in participants' recovery. For example, the surgical community has focused on pathways such as Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS), to improve patient's outcome and surgical experience. Despite this emphasis, little has been described in the literature as to how surgeons can improve a patient's experience by counseling participants on what participants can expect before, during, and after the surgery.

Conditions