Perioperative refers to the total surgical experience and includes pre-, intra- and postoperative phases of the patients

surgical journey (Phillips, 2004). Historically, for patients, student nurses and other hospital staff, the perioperative or theatre area has been seen as one of high drama and action, as portrayed regularly by the media, many having preconceived ideas about the roles and contribution made by those within the environment. Yet for many individuals, it is a time when they are most vulnerable or scared. For patients, they are asleep, unsure if they will wake up and what will happen to them; for student nurses, it is a strange experience, which to begin with they feel unable to relate to other environments; and for other hospital staff, they feel as if they are entering an environment where everything is different and goes on behind closed doors. Ensuring that the highest standard of patient care is delivered to each, individual patient throughout their journey within the perioperative environment is fundamental to the perioperative nurses role. Patients have always been consumers. (Rosemary A. Stevens et al. eds., 2006). They are customers of health care services. As consumers, the role of care providers is to improve service levels and deliver personalized programs, provide greater access to patient health care records and offer more education and options for health self-management. In providing these services, a care provider must anticipate the preference of the patient. Patient preferences result from deliberation about specific elements, such as anticipated treatments or health outcomes. Patient preferences refer to the individual's evaluation of dimensions of health outcomes and are but one of a large number of preferences that may influence health care choices. These judgments are expressed as statements or actions. Patient preferences result from cognition, experience, and reflection and exist as the relatively enduring consequences of values [1]. Due to the growing importance of quality assurance and cost containment in healthcare, eliciting patients preferences for perioperative outcomes may be a more economical and reliable method of assessing quality[K. Jenkins et.al. eds, 2000). Obtaining patient perceptions may be more economical and reliable than traditional methods of assessing quality.*3+ Preferencebased guidelines are more likely to meet criteria for high quality guidelines than those developed without considering patients preferences.*2+ Conjoint analysis provides a model of consumer utilities for various attributes of multifactor stimuli: the model is built by quantifying respondents preferences for a set of factorially designed alternatives (Green 1974). The conjoint analysis identies the combination of attributes that provide the consumer with the highest utility, and corroborates the relative contribution of attributes to total utility (Ness and Gerhardy 1994). In a typical experiment, the attributes of interest are varied with a factorial design, and each consumer is asked to provide scores of their preference or purchase intent for various combinations of the attributes. This study investigated the preferences of perioperative patients. The objectives were to determine: 1. Casper GR, Brennan PF. Improving the quality of patient care: the role of patient preferences in the clinical record. Proc 17th Annu Symp Comput Appl Med Care. 1993: 8-11. 2. Owens DK. Patient Preferences and the development of practice guidelines. Spine 1998; 23: 107379 3. Davies AR, Ware JE Jr. Involving consumers in quality of care assessment. Health Aff 1988; 7: 33