Perioperative anxiety in children undergoing surgeries, is found to be associated with multiple clinical and behavioral adverse outcomes- increased analgesic requirements, emergence delirium(ED), sleep disturbances, enuresis. The use of sedative premedication, however should not be considered as the first and only method to allay their anxiety, as none of the pharmacological agents used for this purpose is found to be ideal or free from adverse effects. Moreover, administering such drugs mandates availability of monitoring and resuscitative equipments, as well as adequate fasting periods. In the light of the wide range of non-pharmacological methods available to reduce anxiety in children, it is imperative that paediatric anaesthesiologists utilize these techniques wherever possible and make the entire experience of undergoing anaesthesia and surgery more comfortable and physiological for them.

However, due to the already established efficacy of the pharmacological premedications, there exists some hesitation with the use of non-pharmacological interventions, and the efficacy of these techniques are only recently being studied. To the best of our knowledge, there is scarcity of literature comparing multiple such techniques, and hence, comparing their efficacy may give us direction and more clarity on their future use and implementation on regular basis.

We compare the efficacy of two non- pharmacological anxiolysis techniques to allay anxiety among (5-14) year old children undergoing elective surgeries with respect to a control group, where verbal preparation was used by the anaesthetists at their own discretion. The groups compared were:

1. Individual cartoon video (Test- group V)

2. Guided tour of operation theatre using VR headset(Test- group VR)

3. Verbal preparation at the discretion of the anaesthetist during PAE and in OT (Control- group C)