Doctor vs Patient: Eye Surgery Sedation

Everyone has an opinion. What happens when doctors' opinions differ from the patient's? A study in the journal of Clinical Ophthalmology measured, post ophthalmic surgery, the satisfaction level of the surgeon, anesthesiologist, and patient. The authors of the journal article analyzed over 280 ophthalmic surgical cases. Before surgery, patients received a benzodiazepine; supplemental anesthesia was given, as needed, during surgery. Dosage was based on the patient’s BMI. Because the type and amount of anesthesia used is not standardized, “If provider assessment is not reflective of patient comfort,” says coauthor Hyunjoo Lee, MD, PhD, an ophthalmologist at Boston Medical Center, “patients may not be receiving adequate sedation throughout their procedures. This could lead to lower patient satisfaction.”

Questionnaire answers showed researchers that, “on average patient satisfaction increased with increasing surgeon and anesthesiologist satisfaction; however, there was a low degree of correlation between these measures, indicating that surgeon and anesthesiologist satisfaction cannot be used to reliably predict patient satisfaction. Moreover, even when individual measures of patient satisfaction, such as pain and anxiety, were isolated, the correlations between provider and patient satisfaction remained low.”

 

Read the journal article.

Read the press release.

Other Categories:

• Anesthesiology

• pain assessment

• pain management

• Surgery