EVALUATING THE EFFECT OF PRE-INFORMING PATIENTS ON ANXIETY LEVELS BEFORE THE IMPLANTED PORT PLACEMENT

Objective: the objective of this study is to evaluate the effect of pre-informing patients on anxiety levels who will receive implantable port catheter placement. method: in this research, the study sample group includes 100 patients admitted to the radiology center of radiology department in hacettepe university adult hospital for implanted port placement. this research was conducted between 24.06.2007–30.06.2008 in interventional radiology center of radiology department in hacettepe university adult hospital. the sample group of this study includes 20% of the patients to represent 518 patients admitted to center for implantable port catheter placement during one year period. this research is a quasi-experimental study. the data for this research was collected by individual information form, state-trait anxiety inventory i-ii and by face-to-face interviews. chi-square, mann whitney u and kruskal-wallis tests were used for the statistical evaluation of the research data. results: there were no meaningful difference in median values of the state anxiety scores based on the sex, age, occupation, education, marital status, locality and pre-knowledge of implantable port of the patients who would receive implanted port placement. in this study the median value of the permanent anxiety score level of patients in research group is 41 and median value for the control group is 47. the statistical comparison between the median values of permanent anxiety score levels of research and control groups show high significance for the research group (p<0.05). the median values of the permanent anxiety score levels are 43 and 38 for the female patients and male patients, respectively. the statistical assessment between median values of the permanent anxiety score levels based on the patient’s sex show high significance for female patients (p<0.05). conclusion: it is observed that the patients admitted to hospital for implanted port placement have high anxiety levels and providing information about the implantable port catheter does not reduce the anxiety levels. high anxiety level in the study group is linked to the diagnosis of cancer for all the patients. therefore it is assumed that the patient’s anxiety levels are neither reduced nor affected by pre-informing the patients. as a result of our study we conclude that sufficient information without too much detail is necessary to pre-inform the patients before implanted port placement.