Creating a safe and secure environment improves the patient’s anxiety leading to a better healthcare experience. The patient-healthcare provider interaction is one that determines whether patients can be confident in themselves and the service provider’s capability to improve their outcomes. Healthcare providers are therefore expected to commit a significant investment of time and resources to ensuring that the patients’ apprehensions, concerns and expectations are both understood and managed by the clinical team. This then boosts their rehabilitative goals, enhancing their recovery and enabling effective discharge back to the community.

Failure to alleviate or reduce the patient’s fears carries both physiological and psychosomatic repercussions for their recovery. This usually leads to patients losing confidence in themselves either by fearing that something will catastrophically go wrong during their recuperation. This affects their engagement for rehabilitation when they dwell on lingering fears about feeling unsafe going home. Such concerns then delay their discharge further because of anxiety. It may then affect the management of their illness, exacerbate their pain, which results in bedrest for patients with back-pain. This can then lead to infections, delirium due to immobility from bed rest and low mood causing a cycle of delayed recovery and anxiety.

In this loco-regional case study, the Rotterdam Eye Hospital team present a best practice strategy for fear reduction developed to limit or reduce fear to improve patient experience.