role in their child's pre-surgery anxiety
The question of whether the presence of a parent diminishes or increases a child's anxiety prior to surgery may soon be answered with a new psychometric instrument developed at the School of Medicine and the University of Georgia.
An article in the December issue of Anesthesiology details PCAMPIS (Perioperative Child-Adult Medical Procedure Interaction Scale), a measurement tool that creates a complex coding of parent-child communications during the period before surgery. The instrument was developed by Alison Caldwell-Andrews, associate research scientist in the Department of Anesthesiology at Yale's School of Medicine and Ronald Blount of the University of Georgia.
The senior author of the study, Dr. Zeev Kain, professor in Yale's Departments of Anesthesiology and Pediatrics and at the Child Study Center, says bringing parents into the operating room for surgical procedures is not always beneficial to the child or to the parents and may even increase the child's anxiety.
"We simply must look at the interactions between the parents and child," says Kain, who is executive director and founder of the Center for the Advancement of Perioperative Health at the medical school. "We believe that what parents say and do is what is important, not simply whether or not they are present."
Kain says the next step is to apply the PCAMPIS to data researchers gather over the next few years. "Using cutting-edge, coding video technology, we will be able to link interactions between parents and children to outcomes like anxiety and pain," he says. "The end goal is to be able to provide helpful recommendations to parents and doctors in how to best help children."
-- By Jacqueline Weaver
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