Effects of a surgical pre-operative assessment clinic on patient care.

Surgery makes many demands of both hospitals and patients. For the hospital, there are many procedural aspects: admission, health assessment, and patient education; the actual operation; and the post-surgical recovery period, a time when patients are susceptible to complications and nosocomial infections. For the patient, surgery means physical pain and emotional anxiety. A pre-operative assessment clinic (POAC), however, can assist both hospital and patients by streamlining their admission, assessment, and education, by decreasing the time they spend in the hospital recovering from surgery, and by easing their anxiety. In this article, the authors describe a study of a POAC at a Canadian hospital.