Home-Initiated Programme to Prepare for Operation (HIPPO) Study

Overview

A hospital admission and surgical operation commonly triggers great fear and anxiety to young children. This is caused by either lack of knowledge or misconception. Although parent and families are often given the task to prepare the child for the oncoming surgery, they often lack information and skill to accomplish this task. Although numerous measures such as pre-operative play room, parental companion during induction, distraction therapy have been employed in our institution, this remains to be a challenge for care of young surgical patients. Our study proposes to use a "prepare-for-operation" (PFO) bundle to assist our paediatric patients and their families to prepare for surgery. The PFO bundle consists of an informative cartoon video illustrating sequence of events occurring in admission, anesthesia and surgery. The video is also accompanied by activity sheets to encourage patient and family to engage, participate and learn about all these events. They will be instructed to use this PFO bundle before admission. We believe that through this off-site and cost-effective intervention, the fear of children undergoing surgery will be significantly alleviated. The family will also have better satisfaction on hospitalization experience. If proven feasible and effective, this will be a simple intervention tool that can be made accessible to all KKH pediatric patients.

Research Plan: A prospective assessor-blinded randomized controlled which will recruit 130 pediatric surgical patients aged 4-10 years, undergoing elective operation in KKH. Eligible patients will be identified when an operation date has been booked. They will be approached by a research coordinator (RC) who will counsel about the study details, and recruited after consent. Randomisaiton will be performed. The subjects will be randomised into group A and group B. Group A will undergo standard workflow for elective surgical admissions. Group B, in addition to standard workflow, will also receive the PFO bundle which consists of: A cartoon video of about 6 minutes duration illustrating the events occuring during admission, anaesthesia and surgery. Video will be given out in DVD and/or with a weblink and a QR code for scanning. The weblink is password protected and is only given to participant and their parents randomised into the video group. Instruction will be given to participants and their parents to watch the video 3 days prior to admission Sets of activity sheets which have been tailored for different age groups. Families would be encouraged to complete activity sheets together.