• Yoriko Doudou, Hiroshi Saeki, Yasuhiro Morimoto, Mishiya Matsumoto, and Takefumi Sakabe.
• Yamaguchi University School of Medicine, Ube 755-8505.
• Masui. 2007 Oct 1; 56 (10): 1220-5.

Background[corrected] Epidural analgesia is one of the methods to relieve pain after the operation. In general, patient-controlled epidural analgesia (PCEA) is efficient in providing high patient's satisfaction. However, it is not clear whether the patients are really satisfied with this analgesic technique in our hospital. Therefore, we studied this issue in 70 patients who had received elective surgery and epidural analgesia postoperatively.MethodsWe used questionnaires to investigate patients' impression of and degree of satisfaction to, epidural analgesia. We interviewed patients before operation and, 1 and 7 days after operation. We also evaluated PCEA usage, analgesic usage and side effects of epidural analgesia during the postoperative period.ResultsPreoperatively 80% of the patients had an anticipation of adequate analgesia with epidural analgesia. Although 54% of the patients had anxiety/fear during the epidural puncture, postoperative analgesia met their expectation in 86% of the patients. PCEA was used only in limited number of patients.ConclusionsThe limited use of PCEA may be caused by inadequate information given to the patients. Therefore, it is necessary to give more easily understandable information to the patients about this analgesic procedure for better patients' acceptance, comfort and satisfaction.

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