PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Anesthesiol.
Sec. Perioperative Medicine
Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fanes.2025.1650491
This article is part of the Research TopicEditors' Showcase: Perioperative MedicineView all 6 articles
Optimizing Surgical Outcomes through Increased Familial Support in the Perioperative Period
Provisionally accepted
- 1American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon
- 2School of Medicine, Wayne State University, Detroit, United States
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Abstract / Summary Familial support in perioperative care is increasingly being recognized as essential for better surgical outcomes, treatment protocols, and overall recovery. Recent work suggests that standardized family involvement leads to measurable improvements, including reduced postoperative delirium (POD) and complications, lower anxiety, shorter hospital stay, and increased patient and family satisfaction. Examples include the Tailored, Family-Involved Hospital Elder Life Program (t-HELP), which reduced POD incidence from 19.4% to 2.6% while preserving functional and cognitive changes in elderly; as well as the Family Involvement Program (FIP), which integrates caregiver training, ward-round participation, and post-discharge support to reduce pneumonia, delirium, and readmissions incidences. Despite these benefits, family engagement remains inconsistently integrated into perioperative settings due to the lack of policies, limited staff training, cultural differences, and workflow concerns. This study reviews recent high-quality evidence, identifies common obstacles, and proposes a structured operational framework for family support comprising: (1) structured perioperative updates at defined milestones; (2) need-based caregiver training; (3) active family inclusion in care planning; (4) integration of digital home monitoring systems; and (5) cultural tailoring of policies and educational materials. If adopted by healthcare systems, this framework can help build perioperative protocols with dedicated resources, supportive policies and leadership endorsement. Future research should explore multicenter implementation, cost-effectiveness, and long-term outcomes of culturally-adapted, digitally-enabled family engagement models.
Keywords: Perioperative Care, Familial support, Patient Safety, Communication, Patient Satisfaction, Patient centered approach, Family centered care
Received: 20 Jun 2025; Accepted: 26 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Assaf, Bazzi, Ghanem and Saasouh. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Wael Saasouh, School of Medicine, Wayne State University, Detroit, United States
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.