Coronary Artery Bypass Graft surgery is the most common type of heart surgery performed each year in the United States (U.S. Department of HHS, 2010). If your healthcare provider were to tell you that you needed heart surgery what would be the first thing to come to mind, would it be fear, pain, anxiety, denial? Do you have any idea what this procedure entails or what to expect before, during, or after your hospitalization?
Preparation is most often a prerequisite for success. Multiple research studies have shown that proper patient preparation can lead to better patient outcomes, including pain and anxiety reduction, cost savings, reduced mortality and morbidity, as well as greater staff satisfaction. Too often patients are inundated with dozens of pages of information and booklets regarding surgery that they become too overwhelmed to even know where to begin. The purpose of this literature review is to identify the potential benefit(s) of a simplified and concise pre-operative patient education brochure or pamphlet prior to Coronary Artery Bypass Grafting (CA.BG) surgery. The main search engines used included PubMed, CINAHL, SCOPUS, and Google Scholar. If literat11re shows that properly educated patients display better post operative outcomes in terms of anxiety reduction, pain control, and reduced readmission rates, it would seem prudent that for optimal patient outcomes, hospitals and more explicitly surgical departments within the hospitals integrate a tool such as this factor that has a great effect on an individual\u27s recovery is pain. Pain has significant negative effects on breathing, eating, movement, perfusion, emotions, and wound 5 healing. While setting a goal of no pain after surgery is not realistic, teaching patients the different methods to control, express, and minimize their pain is beneficial to healing. This paper will attempt to identify documented benefits of patient education about these factors prior to CABG surgery.
Key Words: pre-operative education, Coronary Artery Bypass Grafting (CA.BG), pre-operative anxiety, formal patient education, cardiac surgery education, hospital readmission after cardiac surgery, readmission rate
