Objective: Recognizing patients' psychological problems and understanding their social needs constitute important tasks for medical personnel, because these issues substantially contribute to overall outcome of treatment. People afflicted with surgical diseases need to determine the sense of everyday pursuits and activities and balance it against the therapeutic process. The aim of the study was to assess the relationships between the perception of illness, satisfaction with life and meaning of life among surgical patients.
Methods: A total of 225 patients undergoing surgical treatment in the thoracic surgery department were enrolled in the questionnaire study using Multidimensional Essence of Disease and Illness Scale (MEDIS), Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) and Life Meaningfulness Scale (LMS). Relationships between variables were assessed with Pearson's correlation.
Results: The analysis disclosed negative correlations between the perception of the disease in the light of self-realization constraints and the feeling of satisfaction with one's life (R = -0.25; P < 0.01), an affective component of the LMS (R = -0.29; P < 0.001) and the total result of the LMS (R = -0.21; P < 0.01). Similar relationships were observed between the MEDIS dimension describing a disease as a social withdrawal and the total result of the SWLS (R = -0.21; P < 0.05) and the affective component of the LMS (R = -0.23; P < 0.01).
Conclusions: Suboptimal hospitalization-related perception of the disease due to self-realization constraints profoundly impairs psychological welfare of patients and may exert negative impact on the overall outcome of treatment. We believe that surgical patients require early psychological, social and spiritual support to prevent these harmful psycho-social consequences of illness and hospital stay. Preoperative clinical application of presented scales may be useful to select patients who require more psychological attention in providing information about planned surgical treatment and expected outcomes.