PATIENTS SELF- REPORTING ASSESSMENT OF PAIN INTENSITY AND ANXIETY STATE LEVELS IN THE PERIOPERATIVE ENVIRONMENT OF OBAFEMI AWOLOWO UNIVERSITY TEACHING HOSPITALS COMPLEX, ILE-IFE, NIGERIA

The primary responsibility of the health care providers is to assess and educate the patient during perioperative phases, to minimize the dangers during the surgery. Anxiety and pain are subjective experiences of surgical patients. Hospitalization provokes anxiety in the patient admitted for surgery, even in the absence of disease. In Nigeria, 95% of surgical patients were reported to have experienced postoperative pain of various degrees. Pain is unique to every patient as it is first of all a subjective experience. This study described patients self-reporting assessment of pain and anxiety among surgical patients in ObafemiAwolowo University Teaching Hospitals Complex, Ile-Ife, Osun State, Nigeria. Two-group pre-test, post-test quasi-experimental study was adopted and thirty surgical patients were included. Sample size was determined using Leslie Kish formula and purposive sampling technique was adopted to select 15 surgical patients into the experimental and control groups respectively. Data was processed using statistical package for social science version 21. One research question was answered using descriptive statistics of percentages. This study showed that majority of the surgical patients in the experimental group (100%) and control (87%) reported that nurses did not assess their levels of anxiety state with any self-reporting standard tool before surgery, neither was it done post-operatively by the response of 93% of patients in the experimental group and 100% of the control group. There were nearly similar responses of the surgical patients in the assessment of pain intensity, as 93% of the experimental group before surgery and 100% of control group after surgery reported that nurses did not use the standardized patient?s self-reporting tool. Nurses should adopt the use of self-reporting of pain and anxiety levels by individual surgical patient during their phases of care for effective management of anxiety states and postoperative pain.