Patients' Participation in Decisions in an Anaesthesia Healthcare Setting : A survey of patients' and personnel's attitudes and experiences

Abstract: A need for the personnel at the Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care Unit at Danderyd Hospital to better understand their patients’ experiences and attitudes towards participation in their care was identified by the Clinical Innovation Fellowship program at Centre for Technology in Medicine and Health. This study aimed to provide the Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care Unit with information on patients and personnel’s experiences and attitudes towards patients’ participation; this would allow them to understand how they should focus their resources. A crosssectional and group comparing survey was performed at the Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care Unit in the spring of 2016. A total of 55 patients scheduled for surgery and 38 from the personnel at the Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care Unit participated. The results show there is high overall satisfaction among the participants of their experiences of patients’ participation. The majority of the patients wanted to be passive in decisions, no connections between personal characteristics and preferred level of participation was found. Patients who did not felt they had been able to participate enough also felt uninformed. Furthermore, physicians seemed to have better opportunities to include patients in decisions compared to the nurses. The healthcare systems should work to adapt the care for each individual patient and to provide them with information suitable for the individual in order to support patients’ participation; IT-systems could be one way of doing this. Future studies should further investigate which factors could influence patients’ participation and how healthcare services and technology could be designed in order to support patient participation.