Grant: Project Grant

Preoperative anxiety (PA) affects up to 5 million children in North America each year and is associated with many adverse medical, psychological, and behavioural effects. In fact, children who are highly anxious often require more medications during surgery and afterwards, and take longer to recover. While many attempts have been made to reduce PA in children, existing interventions (e.g., medications and complex psychological preparation programs) are limited by their expense and time-intensive nature. The current lack of effective and efficient tools for reducing anxiety in children before and after surgery has prompted us to develop and test a new interactive, tablet-based Virtual Reality program, Story-Telling Medicine (STM), to help reduce anxiety and its associated negative effects in children undergoing surgery. STM is an age-appropriate, customizable program that simulates the children's hospital environment by guiding them through all of the settings they will encounter prior to surgery. We will directly observe children, ask for their ratings, and collect biological and physiological measures of anxiety to understand the beneficial effects of STM. This study will compare STM given in addition to usual hospital procedures (known as Usual Care (UC)), to UC alone in reducing anxiety in children undergoing surgery. We predict that children in the STM group will have lower levels of anxiety and fewer other negative effects prior to and after surgery compared to the UC group. This study provides an important opportunity to assess the effects of a simple, new, and inexpensive tool to reduce surgical anxiety in children. If effective, STM will improve children's and families' experiences with surgery and reduce mental and physical health problems in both the short and long term. This tablet-based application can be customized to virtually any surgical setting and so has the potential to be used in hospitals across Canada and beyond.