Family members of surgical patients experience anxiety due to lack of consistent communication during the surgical process. Attending to the needs of the surgical patient's family members is an important factor easily forgotten in a busy clinical arena. The purpose of this project was to decrease the surgical patient's family member's anxiety by providing family members with timely and consistent information regarding the patient's progress through surgery. The theoretical foundation used was general systems theory showing that a change in one part of a system leads to change in the whole system with the use of improved communication and feedback. The key question asked was whether an electronic information system could provide additional information in conjunction with personal interaction to reduce the family member's anxiety. The project design was a prospective, randomized, posttest design in a single-center study using the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory Survey for Adults (STAI). The sample size was 80 surgical patients' family members. Results using the Wilcoxon-Rank-Sum test indicated that the addition of an electronic information display was unable to reduce STAI scores. The medians for the State portion of the survey were .823 across all categories for both the control and intervention groups. The medians for the Trait portion of the survey for both the control and intervention groups were .118 with p >05. Although the data suggests retaining the null hypothesis, a significant social change was the staff's heightened awareness of the surgical patient's family's vulnerability and the need for communication during the perioperative phase.

In hospitals and clinics, medical devices incorrectly assigned to patients may cause various patient safety problems. Moreover, the unknown location of required mobile devices (intravenous pumps, cardiac monitors, etc.) represents additional issues for health providers such as unnecessary search effort, delays, and equipment underuse. To mitigate such issues, a patient-device connectivity management system that monitors and tracks patients and their assigned devices becomes an interesting option. Popular approaches for managing associations between patients and devices often involve bar-coding systems, which still require scanning time, are prone to errors, and do not solve equipment location issues. This thesis introduces a new system that exploits Real-Time Location System (RTLS) technology to track patients and devices and support simpler association by a nurse, until disassociation (voluntary or not) happens, at which point the nurse is notified. This system, called Real-time Patient-Device Association and Disassociation (RPDAD), interacts with nurses through their mobile device (tablet or phone). The system provides a new server-based application that interacts with an existing RTLS (hence enabling the reuse of current hospital infrastructure for mobile equipment tracking), a new Android mobile application for nurses, and a novel approach for automated disassociation tracking. The system was validated through proof-of-concept deployments in a university laboratory and in teaching hospital in Ontario, as well as with extensive testing for several configurations in a university laboratory. This thesis discuss-es the feasibility of the approach, its originality compared to the state of the art, and current technological limitations. We expect this system to help avoid usability and disassociation issues while increasing patient care quality and efficiency.