Effectiveness of Video Assisted Pre-Operative Preparation Programme on Anxiety of the Mothers of Children undergoing Surgery -Randomized Control Trial

Surgery either planned or unplanned is a potentially stressful experience for children. They may fail to understand the reason for surgical intervention and consider it an unjustifiable attack on their bodies. Children need their parents when they are facing the unknown. They need their parents' strength to help them cope up with potentially threatening situations.Fear and anxiety in a child undergoing surgery are correlated positively with parent's level of anxiety. Psychological problems can continue into the postoperative period with increased anxiety, disturbances in eating and sleeping, as well as increased pain and analgesic use. The parent's anxiety is then critical to the anxiety the child experiences when entering the operating room. So, interventions to decrease the parent's anxiety are appropriate.

A randomized control trial study was conducted in Dr. Prabhakar Kore Hospital and MRC, Belagavi among 30 mothers of children undergoing surgery to evaluate the effectiveness of video assisted pre-operative preparation programme on anxiety of mothers in experimental group as compared to control group and to find out the association between pre interventional anxiety scores with selected demographic variables.

The subjects were assigned to experimental and control groups by using random sampling with an evaluative approach. In experimental group, video assisted pre-operative preparation programme was administered for 20 mins while the control group was subjected to routine hospital care. Using Zung's anxiety scale, the anxiety level of the mothers were measured before and next day of intervention prior to surgery.Data obtained were tabulated and analyzed in terms of objectives of the study using descriptive and inferential statistics. Mean anxiety level in the experimental group after video assisted pre-operative preparation programme was 42.5 while the correspondent in the control group was 58.6.An independent sample t-test showed significantly lower anxiety scores in the experimental group after video assisted pre-operative preparation programme as compared with the control group (t= 6.4, p<0.00001) but there was no association found between the pre interventional anxiety scores with selected demographic variables.