Are patients who undergo open-access endoscopy more anxious about their procedures than patients referred from the GI clinic?

OBJECTIVES: Our academic hospital center operates an open access endoscopy service that allows referring physicians to directly schedule patients for outpatient esophagogastroduodenoscopy and colonoscopy without having them first seen in the GI clinic. Although patients from the GI clinic have an opportunity to meet the endoscopist and discuss their procedures directly beforehand, patients who are scheduled to undergo endoscopy through our open access service receive only a brief telephone call from a GI fellow or nurse that is made to screen for contraindications to the procedure and to give instructions. Our objective was to find out whether patients who used our open access service were more anxious about their procedures than those referred from the GI clinic.
METHODS: On arrival to our endoscopy center, consecutive patients from the open access service (n = 142) and the GI clinic (n = 85) completed a questionnaire that included three measures of anxiety. After completion of the endoscopic procedure, the attending endoscopist rated patient cooperation. Patients also completed a phone questionnaire on the day after their procedures assessing their experience with endoscopy.
RESULTS: We found no difference between patients from the open access service and those from the GI clinic in any of the measures of preprocedure anxiety, in scores measuring cooperation during procedures, or in patient ratings of their experience with endoscopy as assessed on the day after procedures.
CONCLUSIONS: Patients who used our open access service were no more anxious about their procedures or less cooperative during them than patients first seen in the GI clinic. In both groups, procedure-related anxiety was decreased in patients who had previously undergone endoscopy.