Patient education is continuously becoming more important to enable patients to participate in making decisions regarding their medical treatment. Specifically, this is also the case for preoperative education on anesthesia. Worldwide, there are many initiatives to improve preoperative patient education and subsequent level of knowledge of anesthesia, for example by using digital aids. The demand for such aids has increased significantly since the start of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic to facilitate remote preoperative anesthesiological screening. Although many videos to educate patients on anesthesia have been developed and circulate on the internet, there has been little effort to compare this method of educating patients with the traditional one-on-one conversation between the anesthesiologist and the patient.

Objective: To compare short, mid-and long term retention of knowledge after education on anesthesia by watching a video to the traditional one-on-one explanation by the anaesthesiologist.

Participants will be randomized into 4 arms. A control group that will only take the knowledge test after the consultation by the anesthesiologist, a baseline group that will take the knowledge test before and after the consultation to investigate the added value of a knowledge test to knowledge retention. The intervention group is divided into 2 groups. One group will see the educational video and take a knowledge test afterwards. The other group will see the educational video and visit the anesthesiologist afterwards and take the knowledge test after the consultation.

After 2 and 6 weeks patients will be asked to take the knowledge test again, to investigate knowledge retention.

The knowledge test that will be used is the Rotterdam Anesthesia Knowledge Questionnaire currently under development in the Erasmus MC Rotterdam.

Inclusion Criteria:

• adults visiting the preoperative anesthesia clinic
• elective surgery
• able to read, write and understand the Dutch language

Exclusion Criteria:

• cardiothoracic surgery

Individual participant data that underlie the results reported in this article, after deidentification.

Within one year after publication, for at least five years

Whom: Investigators whose proposed use of the data has been approved by the principal investigator or its research team.

What types of analyses: To achieve aims in the approved proposal What mechanism: Proposals can be filed at our website: https://www.digica-erasmusmc.nl. To gain access requestors will need to sign a data access agreement, data transfer agreement and any other agreement deemed necessary by our institution for safe data sharing.