| Summary: | 碩士 === 慈濟大學 === 公共衛生研究所 === 95 === Patients who require surgeries, which normally include intrusive interventions that are considered to be more risky, to treat or improve their health tend to be anxious. Such pre-surgery anxiety has negative impact on patients’ cognitive and thinking capabilities which in turn affects the outcome of the surgeries. Well designed and communicated preoperative information is useful to alleviate patients’ cognition of the uncertainty of the surgeries and level of pre-surgery anxiety, as well as to enhance their recovery from the surgery. After the process, the patients will understand the information more and perceive the empathy so as to overcome the fear of uncertainty and to alleviate anxiety. However, health literacy, which is a critical element, influences the effectiveness of the preoperative communication.
Thus, the study took the orthopedic patients of a medical center in southern Taiwan as the sample to investigate the relationships among health literacy, preoperative information understanding, perceived empathy from medical staffs, and preoperative anxiety by a self-structured questionnaire survey.
There were four findings in the study. First, women and persons without surgery experiences in the past were more anxious. Second, those who are younger, having higher levels of education or health literacy, understood the preoperative information better. Third, showing videotape is a more efficient method of communicating than asking patients to read written materials, especially for patients with lower levels of health literacy. Fourth, for patients with higher levels of health literacy, the level of preoperative information understanding and the level of perceived empathy did not affect the level of anxiety; however, for patients with lower levels of health literacy, the level of perceived empathy significantly alleviated preoperative anxiety.
Thus, based on the findings of the research, the medical staffs are suggested to treat the patients with low level of health literacy with more empathy to alleviate their preoperative anxiety. Further studies on exploring the benefits of health literacy as a routine procedure and the ways of communicating with low health literacy patients are needed.
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