When you first interact with a patient who's visibly anxious, what do you typically say to them to calm their nerves?

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I think in an ideal world, we'd want to sit down with the patient and talk to them for hours about their past medical history, but also about their psychological concerns, their anxieties and things about having the operation and their health on a greater scale.

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But we don't actually, unfortunately, and I'm sort of embarrassed, say we don't really have the time to do that. So if a patient is overtly anxious, I try to explore why they're anxious. Are they anxious about the anaesthetic, the surgery, a particular aspect of the anaesthetic? And then I try to focus on that and then allay their anxiety by, sometimes, as I said, quoting some figures, but that won't make you necessarily feel any better. But then again, I'm almost embarrassed to say we have some pharmacological agents that we can use to help people that are anxious become less anxious.

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You may have heard of Valium and Diazepam. We have Benzodiazepine. We have something called Midazolam, which we can give you. So for example, if you are having a spinal anesthetic before you went off to sleep, you need to have that awake. So I offer some of these medications to patients that can help.