Can providing paging devices relieve waiting room anxiety?

AORN Journal, April, 1998 by Robert Topp, Eileen Walsh, Carol Sanford

DISCUSSION

These results

* support the hypothesis that individuals who receive pagers report greater activity levels during surgical procedures;

* do not support the hypothesis that individuals who receive pagers report reduced feelings of threat during surgical procedures; and

* appear to contradict the hypothesis that individuals who receive pagers report reduced anxiety levels during surgical procedures.

There are a variety of possible explanations for these findings. These results appear to be consistent with previous researchers who have found waiting in surgical waiting rooms to be an anxiety-provoking experience. The state anxiety scores of the subjects in the experimental group were similar to those reported by previous samples of family members who were waiting in surgical waiting rooms(18) The anxiety level of the experimental group appears significantly higher than the norm observed in working adults.(19) These findings are consistent with previous researchers who also found their sample of individuals in surgical waiting rooms to have higher anxiety levels than normal.(20) These findings seem to indicate that giving subjects in waiting rooms paging devices had no significant effect on their state anxiety when compared to previous samples who were waiting in surgical waiting rooms.

The lower state anxiety reported by the control group may be a function of their self-selecting to participate in the study. Approximately 50% of the potential subjects dropped out of the study when they discovered they were assigned to the control group and would not receive paging devices. More than 90% of the subjects who were approached to participate in the experimental group completed the study's protocol. This indicates that subjects in the experimental group may have more accurately represented the population of individuals who wait in surgical waiting rooms. This contention is further supported by the similarity in state anxiety scores between the experimental group and the previous samples of family members waiting in surgical waiting rooms.(21) This observation, linked with the higher refusal rates and the lower state anxiety scores of the control group, indicates that the control group that completed the study protocol may represent a different population that has a different potential for state anxiety from the experimental population. If this is an accurate assumption, then the differences in state anxiety between the two groups may be explained by the control group's having less state anxiety due to their self-selection, rather than due to their lack of paging devices.

Perceived threat appeared unaffected by the introduction of digital pagers. Both groups exhibited similar perceived threat scores. These scores also were similar to the standard scores reported by the investigators who developed the instrument.(22) One explanation for the stability of this instrument, regardless of the situational event of waiting in surgical waiting rooms and being provided with digital pagers, may be that the threat index instrument was originally developed to assess attitudes toward death and death anxiety.(23) This construct may not be amenable to the episodic event of waiting in surgical waiting rooms or the intervention of digital pagers, but rather the result of a lifetime of experiences or religious beliefs that may be stable and unchanging with the transitory stimuli of waiting during surgical procedures with or without digital pagers.