Perioperative patient satisfaction and its predictors following surgery and anesthesia services in North Shewa, Ethiopia. A multicenter prospective cross-sectional study

Introduction: Patient satisfaction is a relative and complex concept, that mainly depends on the balance between patient's expected and perceived quality of care. Measuring patient satisfaction is important to assess the continuous quality and improvement in anesthesia services, highly affected by anesthetist patient interaction, perioperative anesthetic management and postoperative follow up. The aim of this study was to assess periop-erative adult surgical patient satisfaction and its predictors following surgery and anesthesia services in three general Hospitals in a low income country. Methods: Multicenter prospective cross-sectional study was conducted in all general hospitals found in North Shewa Amhara Regional State hospitals from February to April 2021. After obtaining ethical approval from the institutional review board, 411 willing patients have participated in this study. Data was collected by chart review and face-to-face questions after 24 h of the postoperative period. The level of patient satisfaction was measured via a 5-point Likert scale. Descriptive statistics were presented in frequency and percentage. Both bivariate and multivariate logistic regression models were fit to identify the variables, which had an association with the outcome variable. P-values < 0.2 for bivariate and < 0.05 for multivariate and adjusted odds ratio were used to consider statistically significant. This study is registered with research unique identifying number of researchregistry7502 . Result: Among 411 participants with a response rate of 96.9%; 61.8% were females and 54.7% had surgery under spinal anesthesia. The overall patient satisfaction was 64%. History of anesthesia exposure, premedication, spinal anesthesia and postoperative pain were predictive factors for patient satisfaction after perioperative anesthesia service with AOR (95% CI) P value of 2.311(1.244-4.294)0.008, 2.213(1.277-3.835) 0.005, 2.707(1.458-5.029) 0.002 and 2.430(1.452-4.065) < 0.001 respectively. Conclusion: In general the overall patient satisfaction towards perioperative anesthesia service was low in contrast to many previous studies. Factors that cause dissatisfaction should be prevented or better treated and every stakeholder should be trained and participated.

Automated summary

This study aimed to assess patient satisfaction in perioperative anesthesia services in three general hospitals in a low-income country. The overall satisfaction was found to be low, with factors such as anesthesia exposure history, premedication, spinal anesthesia, and postoperative pain predicting patient satisfaction.