TY - JOUR
T1 - Using an educational multimedia application to prepare children for outpatient surgeries
AU - Fernandes, Sara
AU - Arriaga, Patrícia
AU - Esteves, Francisco
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors thank the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology for providing the financial support for these studies through a PhD scholarship grant for the first author (SFRH/BD/61041/2009).
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
Copyright:
Copyright 2015 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2015/12/2
Y1 - 2015/12/2
N2 - Surgery is a highly stressful event for children and caregivers. Extensive effort has been made to improve preoperative care in order to alleviate worry about the surgical procedure itself. This study tested the impact of an educational multimedia intervention on the cognitive, emotional, and physiological responses of children undergoing surgery, as well as on parental state anxiety. Children (n = 90) were assigned to three different groups: an educational multimedia intervention (experimental group), an entertainment video game intervention (comparison group), and a control group (no intervention). Children who received the educational multimedia intervention reported lower level of worries about hospitalization, medical procedures, illness, and negative consequences than those in the control and in the comparison groups. Parental state anxiety was also lower in the both the educational and the entertainment video game interventions compared to the control group. These findings suggest that providing information to children regarding medical procedures and hospital rules and routines is important to reduce their preoperative worries, and also relevant for parental anxiety.
AB - Surgery is a highly stressful event for children and caregivers. Extensive effort has been made to improve preoperative care in order to alleviate worry about the surgical procedure itself. This study tested the impact of an educational multimedia intervention on the cognitive, emotional, and physiological responses of children undergoing surgery, as well as on parental state anxiety. Children (n = 90) were assigned to three different groups: an educational multimedia intervention (experimental group), an entertainment video game intervention (comparison group), and a control group (no intervention). Children who received the educational multimedia intervention reported lower level of worries about hospitalization, medical procedures, illness, and negative consequences than those in the control and in the comparison groups. Parental state anxiety was also lower in the both the educational and the entertainment video game interventions compared to the control group. These findings suggest that providing information to children regarding medical procedures and hospital rules and routines is important to reduce their preoperative worries, and also relevant for parental anxiety.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84941793378&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/10410236.2014.896446
DO - 10.1080/10410236.2014.896446
M3 - Article
C2 - 25144403
AN - SCOPUS:84941793378
SN - 1041-0236
VL - 30
SP - 1190
EP - 1200
JO - Health Communication
JF - Health Communication
IS - 12
ER -