Patients' expectations in relation to outcome of total hip replacment surgery.

Abstract

SUMMARY The importance of expectations has been assessed by giving 88 patients who had undergone total hip replacement surgery a series of visual analogue scales to provide a pain score, a 5-point rating scale to assess their remembered expectations, and an interview to establish clinical, functional, social, and psychological data. Patients generally had high expectations, but only 55 % had their expectations fulfilled. Despite this, 86% claimed the operation to be successful, though when questioned more closely patients noted a certain amount of displeasure about the outcome. Further analysis revealed that, when the sample was split into 2 groups of fulfilled and unfulfilled expectations, significant differences were noted in that the quality of life enjoyed by the former group was greater than that enjoyed by the latter group. This finding suggests that the notion of 'success' is not as effective as the notion of 'expectations' as a measure of the outcome of total hip replacement surgery.

Dissatisfaction, disability, and rheumatoid arthritis

“…Burton et al showed that in the case of a specific intervention (total hip replacement), dissatisfaction with outcome correlated with failure to fulfill prior expectations [6]. In our study, expectations relate to the further progress of the disease without specific therapeutic intervention.…”

“…These correlations are relatively low, however, with actual disability explaining only 48% of the variance in dissatisfaction with disability. Other work has suggested that dissatisfaction with the outcome of total hip replacement relates to prior expectation [6] and that depression influences dissatisfaction with disability in the chronically ill [7].…”

Patient expectations for surgical outcome in extremity soft tissue sarcoma

“…Similar to what has been reported in Journal of Surgical Oncology Defined as patients having an incomplete primary excision at a peripheral hospital prior to their definitive surgery at a study center. other surgical populations, patients' expectations were generally high, with almost 50% of our cohort expecting a short, uncomplicated recovery and no difficulty performing daily activities post-operatively [19,28,29,33,34]. However, we also found that a significant percentage of our patients did not know what to expect regarding their postoperative recovery.…”

Patients With Thumb Carpometacarpal Arthritis Have Quantifiable Characteristic Expectations That Can Be Measured With a Survey

“…The design of this investigation was modeled after prior surveys that assessed expectations for other common orthopaedic conditions [5,10,16,19,[21][22][23][24]. The study was a prospective cohort validation study and was performed in the clinical practices of four different orthopaedic hand surgeons in one institution.…”