Difficulties, coping methods and information needs of ambulatory surgery patients during their care at home after discharge

INTRODUCTION AND PURPOSE: The study was done as definitive, regressive and prospective in order to determine the difficulties, coping methods and information needs of ambulatory surgery patients during their care at home after discharge. MATERIALS and METHODS: The population of the study comprised of patients having ambulatory surgery in surgery clinics between 01.01.2017- 01.12.2017; and sample comprised of 101 patients. Data was obtained with surveys including socio-demographic features prepared in line with the literature, by using Patients' Information Needs Scale, SF-36 Life Quality Scale and by tracking after discharge (first 24 hours, 72 hours and until day 7-10). For analysing the data; IBM SPSS Statistic 23 (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) software, Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test, Shapiro Wilk Test, Kruskal Wallis Variance Analysis, Friedman Test and Mann-Whitney U Test were used. FINDINGS: The average age of patients was 50.577±17.71. Of which, 51.5% stated that they have decided to get the surgery a week ago with the physician's request. In review the reason of why the patients preferred the ambulatory surgery, 81.2% was for economical considerations and 15.8% was for not needing to stay in hospital. It was observed that most of the patients participating the study were informed about the surgery (95%) and anaesthesia to be implemented (88.1%) by the operator physician (89.1%) and that 64.4% of them were satisfied by this information. Notwithstanding that the severity of symptoms after the surgery was low on average, it was observed that these symptoms lasted until day 7-10 after surgery, but with a statistical decrease in time significantly (p<0.05). CONCLUSION: As a result, it was observed that the patients, with adequate informing, mostly didn't have difficulty in their daily-life activities and could cope with the symptoms better. We are of the opinion that, planning of patient training by taking patients' information needs into consideration will facilitate the patients to cope with the problems related to the surgery, as well as increase the life quality. Keywords: ambulatory surgery, daily-life quality, life quality, information needs, nursing