Patient empowerment and stress reduction

Nowadays some surgery protocols includes Patient Empowerment as a key factor to enhance patient's mental state to achieve better surgical results. Since 2011, the “Fast Track Prosthetic Knee Project” at the Clinic Hospital of Barcelona (Spain) includes an educational session as patient empowerment previous to knee arthroplasty surgery. This paper presents a study performed in 41 patients measuring the evolution of emotional stress generated by knee arthroplasty surgical intervention during the educational session. Differences in emotional stress before and after an educational session were analyzed, by using psychometric tests and heart rate variability (HRV) as indicators of stress. Both physiological and psychological measurements suggest the effectiveness of the empowerment session through a higher wellness state of patients, decreasing stress psychometric test value of 45.06% compared to their initial values and increasing the mean HRV 6.08%, with significant p-value (p<;0.0005) of paired samples T-student test, which corroborate that patients have a different stress state before and after the empowerment session. Additionally a Pearson correlation of -0.273 (p=0.02) between these stress indicators confirms that a HRV increase could be associated with less stressed state.