Every medical intervention requires informed consent. Informed consent may include comprehensible information about the necessity and kind of the intervention, material risks and consequences or alternative treatments. Practitioners frequently use consent forms to support the physician-patient conversation and to document informed consent. Studies show, that informed consent forms used in practice, are heterogeneous. This study aims at investigating the effects of evidence-based informed consent forms for Total Knee Replacement and related anaesthesia procedures. Evidence-based informed consent forms include best and latest evidence in lay language. It is hypothesized that evidence-based informed consent forms - compared to standard consent forms - improve patients' risk perception, reduce anxiety of complications and reduce the nocebo effect (unspecific negative effects caused by the way of communicating risks). To compare evidence-based and standard informed consent forms, an Interrupted Time Series pilot study will be conducted. It is planned to include 220 patients, who are scheduled for elective total knee replacement surgery. The accompanying qualitative analyses ensure that the (German) legal requirements for informed consent are met.
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Anxiety: Change from baseline anxiety after the informed consent procedure assessed by the surgical fear questionnaire and a numeric rating scale (0-10)
Timeframe: Anxiety will be measured at the day of consultation - approximately 4 weeks before surgery - (baseline) and one day before surgery
Nocebo-Effect: Proportion of patients with patient reported adverse events/complications and cummulaive number of adverse events/complications assessed by closed and open questions
Timeframe: approximately three days after hospital discharge