BACKGROUND: Pre-anesthesia information of pediatric patients is usually conducted to their parents and sometimes inadequate information makes the parents very anxious about anesthesia. We designed this study to evaluate the response of pediatric patients' parents to pre-anesthesia information.

METHODS: The data was collected based on the answers of 432 parents of pediatric patients to receive general anesthesia for elective surgery. The age of patient is under 17. At the day of admission they were received an explanatory pamphlet. Before the day of surgery, an anesthesiologist visited them and explained about conduct of general anesthesia and its possible complication. After the surgery, we asked the to answer the questionnaire.

RESULTS: Eighty-five percent of the parents had informed about anesthesia and fifity-three percent of them were satisfied about the explanation. Eighty percent of the parents answered their anxiety about general anesthesia wasn't increased after the information and fifty percent of parents answered that it is necessary to tell the plain explanation about general anesthesia to pediatric patients.

CONCLUSIONS: We concluded that pre-anesthetic information is useful to reduce the anxiety of pediatric patients' parents also we got information about what the parents wanted to know about the anesthesia and changes after anesthesia.