| Abstrakt: |
This article discusses various issues related to social work orientation to open-heart surgery in the U.S. A number of articles have been written about the psychosocial aspects of open-heart surgery. Most of these discuss the psychosocial factors which would predispose the patient to failure and the possible detection and correction of these factors. However, several reality factors became apparent to the article author as she initiated a program of psychosocial support for heart surgery patients and their families in a large medical center. Social work orientation to heart surgery includes learning the differences in the kinds of open-heart surgery, potential risks, and complications of each. It has been found that those patients who missed the social work preoperative orientation frequently required a disproportionate amount of time postoperatively to deal with the trauma which they could have been helped to anticipate with those who did not. When the clinical evidence pointed to the efficiency of the preoperative interview and to the poor results when it was omitted, major effort was made to make the preoperative interview a "sine qua non" for all heart surgery candidates. The author views that pre and postoperative intervention can be crucial in the ability of patients and their families to cope with the psychosocial ramifications of heart surgery. |
