Scanxiety research

Scanxiety – do YOU have it?

Insights from healthcare professionals when they themselves undergo medical imaging as patients

Scanxiety

Scanxiety – anxiety before, during, and after medical imaging – is an important issue, as nearly half of all patients experience anxiety during medical imaging procedures. This means that in the Netherlands alone, scanxiety is experienced more than 7.5 million times each year.

With the increasing digitalization of healthcare and the growing workload of healthcare professionals, there is less time for personal attention to patients. In medical imaging – where digitalization is advancing rapidly and workloads are continuously rising – this is felt every day. This widens the gap between efficient technology and human-centered care, potentially worsening patient anxiety.

There is a clear need to preserve the human touch in a rapidly changing and digitalized healthcare environment. Moreover, empathic care is considered one of the key pillars of the future-proof healthcare professional.

We aim to close the gap between healthcare provider and patient, convinced that this not only benefits patients but also increases healthcare professionals’ engagement and job satisfaction. These two processes reinforce one another, creating a continuous improvement environment.

The healthcare provider as patient

The goal of this project is to improve the patient experience in medical imaging by learning from the experiences of healthcare professionals who themselves have undergone imaging procedures.

Why healthcare professionals? We believe that personally experiencing what it is like to be a patient has several advantages:

1. We feel firsthand how vulnerable patients are and the impact scanxiety has on them.
2. With our dual perspective, we can identify the contributing factors more accurately.
3. We know which changes are realistic and feasible in daily clinical practice.
4. Experiencing the patient perspective motivates us to implement and sustain meaningful improvements in our daily work.

Support our research

Your support enables us to conduct research into the factors that can reduce scanxiety. Our project consists of four components:

1. Raising awareness of scanxiety.
    We are building an online information hub (www.stopscanxiety.com) where knowledge and scientific insights about scanxiety are shared. In addition, we actively integrate this topic into (medical) education to raise awareness among future healthcare professionals.
2. Identifying factors contributing to scanxiety based on healthcare professionals’ experiences.
    With the support of our professional associations (NVNG and NvVR), we are collecting data from healthcare professionals who have personally undergone medical imaging, using a nationwide anonymous survey. This will allow us to identify key contributing factors and gather practical suggestions for improvement. We aim for simple, implementable measures that can have a major impact on reducing scanxiety.
3. Introducing measures to reduce scanxiety in clinical practice.
    Based on the findings, we will implement targeted measures in selected radiology and nuclear medicine departments.
4. Measuring the impact.
    In the final phase, we will measure the effect of these interventions on scanxiety, patient satisfaction, and also on healthcare professionals’ engagement and well-being.