Study design and Setting
This descriptive, cross sectional study was conducted between January and March of 2018 in Eritrea, a country in the horn of Africa. Eritrea has two National Referral Hospitals which are located at the Capital city, Asmara. They are called Halibet and Orotta National Referral Hospitals and both of them provide health services at a tertiary level. They are the only governmental medical surgical national referral hospitals in which all types of major and minor surgeries take place.
Participants
During the study period, a total of 526 patients underwent surgeries under general and regional anaesthesia. The eligibility to participate in the study was based on the respondent’s willingness to take part in the study. The flow diagram that shows the ultimate eligible participants (n=470) in the study is discussed elsewhere (18).
Data collection tool and method
The key elements of socio-demographic and clinical characteristics of the patients were obtained using a socio-demographic and clinical form. The socio-demographic and clinical details obtained were age, gender, place of residence (urban or rural), occupation, hospital setting, health coverage, type of anesthesia, type of surgery, and admission type (emergency or elective). The undesirable anesthesia outcomes were measured using the dimension “discomfort and needs” of the Leiden Perioperative Patient Satisfaction questionnaire (LPPSq). The LPPSq was initially modified by Calijouw et al. (2008) and permission was asked and obtained from the responsible author. The LPPSq is a validated suitable for research scale (22), having six dimensions, in which ‘discomfort and needs’ was separately handled and analysed because of its unique psychometric characteristics (23, 24). As far as the founders of the scale are concerned, the internal consistency within the discomfort and need dimension was so low that, it was not incorporated to get a composite score of the LPPSq, resulting to analysis of the individual items separately. This of course was one of the clear indications that the items listed in the dimension provide wider objectives and another perspective of anesthesia service. Explanation of the five other dimensions is made in previous publication (18). The ‘discomfort and needs’ investigates the common adverse outcomes of anesthesia raised from patient’s perspective including post-operative pain, sore throat, back pain, nausea, vomiting, cold, hunger, thirst, and headache.
Data was collected through face to face interview by four well trained anaesthetists who do not work in the study settings. They were also assistant researches and were well aware of the study objectives.
Data Collection Procedure
The researchers visited each hospital and explained the purpose of the study and its clinical significance to the hospital directors after getting the ethical clearance approval by the Research and Human Resources Development, Ministry of Health. Permission to conduct the study was then obtained from each hospital director. Recruitment of the patients was undergone before the moment of their operation. After full explanation of the study objectives and assurance of confidentiality and anonymity, patients were given written informed consent. The interview was then conducted in their respected postoperative wards after making sure that they are free from acute postoperative discomfort. Data was collected through face to face interview and the time to complete the questionnaire was about 15 to 20 minutes. The interview was done with purpose of assessing the status of undesirable perioperative anesthesia outcomes using the questionnaire.
Variables and Measures
The items in the ‘discomfort and need’ were standardized and measured using a five point Likert scale. Patients had to state to which degree they experienced each of the attribute stated in each item after operation. The replies to the items were “Not at all” (0), “A little bit” (1), “Moderately” (2), “Quite a bit” (3), and “Extremely” (4). The items were then computed in to two sequences of prevalence; prevalence of those with ‘at least a little bit’ undesirable anesthesia outcome occurrence which was computed to see the total occurrence of these undesirable outcomes and prevalence of those having ‘more than moderate’ perioperative undesirable anesthesia outcome occurrences to see the severe occurrence of these outcomes.
Validity and Reliability
Content validity of the items of the dimension was checked along with the rest of the dimensions by expert opinion from the anesthesia department. Translation (to the local language) was done by bilingual language expert and was then back translated to English by another bilingual person who was not aware of the study objectives. A pre-test was also done to ascertain the comprehension and understandability of the questions. Internal consistency of the dimension was also checked (Chronbach α = 0.66).
Data Analysis
Responses were coded and entered into SPSS (Version 22) statistical software for analysis. Data cleaning and preliminary explorations were done to assure accuracy of entry before conducting the main analysis. Frequency (percentage) and mean (standard deviation) was used to summarize the demographic and clinical variables of the participants. The prevalence of those with ‘at least a little bit’ outcome occurrence and prevalence of those with ‘more than moderate occurrence’ were also computed. Moreover, odds ratios (95% CI) were computed to assess the association of undesirable anesthesia outcomes with the types of surgery and types of anesthesia using multivariable logistic regression. P-values less than 0.05 were considered as significant throughout the analyses.