Excellent Perioperative Patient Experience

Patient experience has become an increasingly important focus in health care over the last 20 years, but its relevance and implications for perioperative care are just becoming understood. The easing of patients’ fears and anxiety as they undergo procedures has always been a goal for clinicians, but the critical nature of this goal became more obvious during the COVID-19 pandemic, when care was disrupted in so many ways. Without the familiarity of “business as usual” procedures of perioperative care, patients and their families were unnerved, and clinicians had to use principles of high reliability to preserve safety but also to ensure that care was coordinated and empathic—before, during, and after surgery.

The lessons learned in perioperative care during the COVID-19 pandemic should not be forgotten once the crisis passes. This chapter will therefore present a brief history of the emergence of patient experience as an important dimension of quality, a summary of data on factors that help increase patients’ trust in their care, and some principles for improvement.