Pre-Anaesthesia CompuTerized Health Assessment

Pre-anaesthesia assessment is an important component of preoperative care of surgical patients. With the increasing prevalence of same-day-admission and ambulatory surgery, patients no longer undergo preanaesthesia assessment as an inpatient in traditional "premed rounds". Currently, a nurse-administered paper-based health screening questionnaire is used at the Preadmission Service to identify patients who require outpatient evaluation by anaesthetists prior to elective surgery. In this study, the investigators aim to re-design and convert the current paper-based, nurse-administered health screening questionnaire into a reliable patient self-administered digital tool- Pre-Anaesthesia CompuTerized Health-assessment (PATCH). The electronic questionnaires will be validated by comparison of responses from digital self-administration against that obtained from a nurse interview structured to the same format. The investigators hypothesize that the responses obtained using PATCH will have at least 95% agreement with responses obtained in a nurse-led structured interview. Finally, the use of PATCH would be compared with standard nurse-led paper-based interview in a non-blinded, randomised controlled trial with regard to time taken for nurse processing of the patient at the clinic.