The Fear of Surgery and Coronavirus in Patients Who Will Undergo a Surgical Intervention.
Ayşe Gökçe Işıklı, Zeynep Kızılcık Özkan, Zuhal Buberka
PMID 36050208WHAT IT FOUND
Patients awaiting heart or chest surgery reported low surgical fear.
Surgical fear was higher with chronic disease, coronavirus fear was higher with less education, and the two fears were weakly linked.
Key findings
01Average surgical fear was 26.9 on a 0-to-80 scale (SD 20.5), and average coronavirus fear was 18.2 on a 7-to-35 scale (SD 7.5).
02Patients with chronic disease had higher surgical fear than patients without chronic disease (30.8 vs 23.2 on a 0-to-80 scale; P = .043).
03Surgical fear and coronavirus fear were weakly positively correlated (rs = 0.102; P < .001).
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
The study used convenience sampling in one university hospital, so the patients may not represent other surgical populations. It measured fear at one time point and did not test whether assessing or supporting fear changes any patient outcome. Fear scores were self-reported, and the supplied text does not report missing-data handling. The low surgical fear and moderate coronavirus fear may reflect local pandemic conditions, including that the hospital was not a pandemic hospital and 89.3% of patients were vaccinated. Several group comparisons were made, and the correlation between the two fear scores was weak.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence that nurse-led fear assessment improves outcomes. It is a cross-sectional survey of fear levels and associations, not a trial of an intervention.