Preoperative education: empowering patients with confidence

Preoperative education is widely used by health-care professionals all over the world to help patients to prepare for their impending surgery and postoperative needs. The focus of this research was a multidisciplinary preoperative education programme provided in one UK NHS trust for patients awaiting a total hip replacement. The purpose of this research was to gain an understanding of how the preoperative education process achieves beneficial health and wellbeing outcomes proven in previous research. This article reports on one of the themes which arose from the data; namely the beneficial outcome of empowering patients.

A case study enabled the researcher and the health-care professionals who provided preoperative education to understand the role of the educational process in empowering patients. It appeared that the educational product and processes enabled patients to gain confidence, which empowered them to prepare for a total hip replacement.