Background and Goal of Study: Patientreported
outcomes have become one of the most
important measures for assessing medical and surgical treatments.Patient satisfaction is an
important tool for prompting improvements in clinical care.We aimed to evaluate if the the quality of
recovery has influence on patient's satisfaction after anaesthesia.
Materials and Methods: After approval by the institutional ethics committee, an observational,
prospective study was performed in 133 patients scheduled for elective surgery. Patients included
were older than 18 years, undergoing plastic, gynaecologic, urologic and general curative surgery,
admitted to the Post Anaesthetic Care Unit (PACU).Exclusion criteria was inability to give informed
consent.Patients' demographics and perioperative data were collected.Postoperative Quality of
Recovery Scale (PQRS) was used to identify patients' satisfaction, 3 days after surgery.PQRS and
Quality of Recovery 15 score (QoR15)
were used to evaluate the quality of recovery after surgery.
PQRS was used at baseline and after surgery at minute 15 (T15), 40 (T40) and days 1 (D1) and 3
(D3) evaluating recovery in five domains: physiological (PD), nociceptive (ND), emotive (ED),
activities of daily living (AD) and cognition (CD).Recovery was defined as the return to baseline
values or better within each domain. Incomplete recovery was defined as recovery in less than 2
domains at D1. Satisfaction was assessed by a fivepoint
Likert scale. The MannWhitney
test, Chisquare
or Fisher's exact test were used for comparisons.
Results and Discussion: From 148 patients, 133 completed the questionnaires.Eightyfive
percent
of the patients were completely satisfied with anaesthesia care. Complete satisfaction was more
frequent for patients submitted to general anaesthesia (73% vs. 45%; p =0.014) and less frequent
for patients submitted to regional anaesthesia (4% vs. 25%; p=0.01). At D1, patients with
incomplete satisfaction had similar total Qor15
scores (p=0.233) and, considering each item of
QoR15
these patients had lower median values in 2 of them: “feeling rested”(p=0.04) and “feeling
worried or anxious”(p=0.04).There were no differences on rates of recovery at PQRS.
Conclusion(s): Patients with incomplete satisfaction had a poor quality of recovery in two items of
the QOR15
score at D1.Type of anaesthesia played an important role in neoplastic patient's
satisfaction as well as feeling less rested and more anxious.

Patient satisfaction with anesthesia for curative neoplastic surgery: the impact of quality of recovery