Health Technology Assessment (HTA) has various areas of application, one of which is quality improvement activities in clinical settings. Using patients' satisfaction as indicator of quality of care can inform the ‘needs assessment’ of a clinical deparment.

The principal aim of this study is to quantify patients’ satisfaction with the anesthesia services received perioperatively at our hospital, including physical discomfort and anesthesia care. To this end, we asked the following question: “In adult patients who undergo day surgery at our hospital, what is the level of satisfaction with the anesthesia services received perioperatively?" A second aim is to discuss how quality assessment and HTA can intertwine.

This is a quality assessment study, using a patient self-administered survey method.

We included all patients who had a day-surgery at our hospital and we excluded those who cannot understand English or French, who present cognitive barriers, and those who were admitted the same day.

Patients were recruited postoperatively in phase II of recovery, using a nonprobability convenience sampling method. We used a validated questionnaire which addresses the two dimensions of anesthesia care related our research question: (i) physical discomfort and (ii) satisfaction with anesthesia care. We added to this questionnaire, a supplemental question to measure satisfaction with preoperative anesthetic care. Parallel to this, we also gathered the data routinely collected by the recovery nurses during a 24 hour postoperative patient follow-up.

We collected data from November 2015 to February 2016. A total of 156 questionnaires was completed. Two respondents (1.3 percent) said they were ‘unsatisfied’ or ‘very unsatisfied’ with the anesthesia care they received in general and thirty-six (23 percent) said they were ‘satisfied’. The most frequently reported physical discomfort symptoms were: thirst (78 percent), pain (72 percent), drowsiness (68 percent), cold (58 percent), and sore throat (54 percent).

Our study suggests that, while reporting patients' level of satisfaction regarding various aspects of the anesthesia care they received, such quality assessment study can identify gaps in the use of existing methods and technologies and help in acquisition prioritizing.