Effects of psychological preparation on reduction of surgery anxiety signs in children

 Introduction: As surgery is a stressful experience for patients and anxiety can lead to sings such as increase of heart rate, hypertension, and bleeding and post-operation symptoms, it is necessary to implement ways to reduce anxiety especially for children. So the purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of psychological preparation on reduction of surgery anxiety signs in children.  Materials and Methods: In this quasi-experimental study in Shahid Beheshti Hospital in Hamedan (Iran), 30 children, aged 6-12, including 18 boys and 12 girls aging 8.17 (SD=1.82) prepared for a kind of urological surgeries were selected and randomly placed into two groups of experimental and control. The Powell psychological preparation program was conducted for the experimental group. The data collection tools were demographic questionnaire, Hamilton anxiety questionnaire and the observation sheet of vital signs such as systolic, diastolic blood pressure and rate. Results: The data obtained from multivariable variance analysisshowed that psychological preparation leads to significant reduction of surgery anxiety in children. Children in the experimental group showed less anxiety prior to surgery compared with those in the control group.  Conclusion: The psychological preparation for surgery can be applied as an effective way to reduce surgery anxiety in children in all hospital of the country