What factors are important when deciding between open surgery or endovascular repair?

So, I think a really interesting topic is what things a patient or a person or a group looking after you should consider when making a decision whether you have an open or endovascular aneurysm repair. We've done some research on this to look at various stakeholders, obviously the main stakeholder as the patient, as a person having a procedure, and the surgeons performing the procedure for you, together with the radiology colleagues who might be performing the endomascular procedure in partnership with your surgeons. But also other stakeholders like the intensive care doctors who look after you immediately afterwards in the intensive care or high-dependency unit, perioperative physicians who are involved in your care before and after, as well as the anaesthetist to look after you while you're having the operation. So looking at all these different groups of stakeholders or people involved in aneurysm repair, we found that different groups focus on different things, but I think all of them are important to be aware of for the patient, and the list is quite long, and we'll include it in the description section, but they range from things like whether your pre-existing medical conditions list is long or short, whether you're more tolerant of the risk of post-operative complications or not, whether you're interested in long-term durability of the repair or whether you're more interested in having a very, very short hospital stay to start with. The need to have repeat procedures done every year, up to maybe 20-30% of people having endovascular repair would need repeat procedures. That is an important thing. The length of stay in hospital after the operation, that we found to be important in people's mind. Interestingly the type of anesthesia is also quite a prominent factor, whether you need a general anesthetic or whether you need a spinal anesthetic or even local anesthetic these days. And social factors, how it might affect your family and friends and whether you need any support when you go home. So there are a whole range of factors that you should consider when making your decision and it's our job to point those out and explain them and facilitate a shared decision between healthcare providers and patients.