Is structured pre-surgical education more effective than non-structured education?

Provision of patient education is an integral part of health care. Furthermore, it is essential that educational techniques result in desired outcomes. The purpose of this literature synthesis is to measure the effects of structured presurgical patient education programs on post-surgical compliance with a therapeutic regimen. A computer-based literature search identified acceptable studies that were evaluated by the following literature synthesis techniques: vote counting, meta-analysis, and study characteristic coding. The synthesis findings were inconsistent and failed to indicate that structured education was more effective than unstructured education in promoting compliance with a therapeutic regimen. These findings may be due to flaws in the individual studies, incomplete reporting of descriptive statistics in the individual studies, imperfections in the education programs, or a lack of impact of educational programs on patient compliance.