Professionalism and cordiality are Israeli patients' expectations and preferences when choosing an anesthesiologist: A pre-anesthesia visit survey

The main purpose of this survey is to assess patients' expectations and concerns about their potentially future anesthesiologist, as expressed by them during pre-anesthetic interviews. For this purpose, a cross-sectional survey of 50 items was conducted during one year on patients scheduled for elective surgery under anesthesia. The voluntary response rate was 97.7%. The cohort included 175 men and 167 women with a mean age of 60.4±14.4 years. Most of them (86%) had an educational level above elementary school, and the majority of the cohort (95%) was Jewish. Most of the participants were born in Israel, one-third spoke 1 or more foreign languages, and 39% defined themselves as being religious. The patients' expectations from the anesthesiologist were equally distributed between professionalism, qualifications and academic standing, while also emphasizing personality characteristics, such as pleasantness, appearance, and communication skills. These responses correlated with the patients' religiosity, age, gender, marital status, and past experiences with medical staff. Post-meeting satisfaction analyzed in 25% of the cohort, focused mainly on physician's personality. Based on the findings of this survey, Israeli anesthesiologists need to be aware of their patients' needs and expectations, on both a professional and a personal level, in order to accommodate patients' concerns and answer their expectations even ahead of stressful experiences.