• Ivan Kai-Hsiang Hsia, Franklin Dexter, Ilana Logvinov, Nikola Tankosic, Harish Ramakrishna, and Sorin J Brull.
• From the *Department of Anesthesiology, Windsor Regional Hospital Ouellette Campus, Windsor, Ontario, Canada; †Division of Management Consulting, Department of Anesthesia, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa; ‡Department of Nursing, Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Jacksonville, Florida; §Department of Anesthesiology, Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Phoenix, Arizona; and ‖Department of Anesthesiology, Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Jacksonville, Florida.
• Anesth. Analg. 2015 Aug 1; 121 (2): 502-6.

BackgroundThere are few data on patients' desire to be informed of drug shortages before elective surgery. We surveyed patients who had previously undergone laparoscopic cholecystectomy for their opinions.MethodsNine hundred forty-nine Mayo Clinic patients were invited to participate in the survey. The postal survey posed a hypothetical surgical scenario and requested answers regarding the desire to be informed and to postpone scheduled surgery because of neostigmine shortage. Comparison was made with Canadian patients from a hospital in Ontario.ResultsMost of the 256 respondents wanted "to be told by the anesthesia doctor about the neostigmine shortage" if there were "slight differences" in side effects between the drug combinations (P < 0.0001). The percentage of patients wanting to know was 76.2% (95% confidence interval, 70.5%-81.3%). Secondary analyses tested the validity and reliability of the survey. With each increase in the differences in substituted drug's side effects, there was a progressive increase in the patients' desire for information (P < 0.0001; 73.2%, 76.2%, and 95.7% of 246, 256, and 253 respondents, respectively) and preference for delaying surgery (P< 0.0001; 33.6%, 39.4%, and 80.9% of 238, 246, and 241 respondents, respectively). There was no association with respondents' sex (P = 0.19), age (P = 0.76), educational level (P = 0.39), or country (United States versus Canada [n = 58]; P = 0.87).ConclusionsThe majority (>50%) of surveyed patients want to be informed of drug shortages that might affect their care.

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