Camila Costa
Pronouns: she/her
Research Mentor(s): Sydney Brown
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Anesthesiology / Medicine
Program: UROP
Session: Session 6 (3:40pm – 4:30pm)
Authors: Camila Costa, Gillian Waitzman, Sydney Brown, Sarah Oh
Abstract
Certain aspects of patients’ life and identity make them more or less likely to experience certain adverse or favorable outcomes in post operative conditions. The purpose of this study is to learn more about common symptoms and other problems that adolescents experience after receiving anesthesia for outpatient surgery. The best way to learn about these things is to talk directly to individuals and their family members who have recently gone through this experience, and hopefully this will allow us to come up with ways to improve these symptoms in pediatric patients that we take care of in the future. While searching for potential patients, this study follows a specific criteria. All 31 subjects were between ages 11-17. Participant ages were evenly distributed with a median age of 15 years. The majority were White, six were Black, two were Hispanic, and one was Middle Eastern. These patients all received general anesthesia and their procedure put them in the “outpatient†category. None of our recruited patients face any mental disorders. Our team identifies potential patients and before they are set to undergo surgery, our research team contacted them for their voluntary participation in their study. If consent was given, a virtual interview was conducted about two weeks post-op. During this interview, we collected a surplus of information on their procedure, personal life, and how recovery has affected them holistically. Our research team found commonalities among our patients that experience similar adverse post-operative symptoms and will use these to identify ways to potentially correct or alleviate these symptoms in a future pre-operative environment. Our research project is a qualitative study and thus did not produce any quantitative/statistical results. Our “results†tell us a story of these patients and why they recovered the way they did. It is up to us to interpret these results and find potential links among patients and their data. Since this study is ongoing and still in the data collection stage, there are no main conclusions to report as of yet. Ultimately, patients and healthcare workers benefit the most from this research. Hopefully, our results successfully identify common risk factors associated with surgery recovery and anesthesia. These results allow future healthcare workers to prevent these reactions in future patients; thus improving their recovery and potential quality of life. In turn, these healthcare workers have greater success by improving their patients’ health.
