Our electronic searches retrieved 1578 records. We selected 42 full-text reports after eliminating duplicates and title and abstract screening. We included eight studies after reading those 42 full text. Exclusion details are shown in Additional file 2. Also, we retrieved 18 potentially relevant studies by cross-citation or references checking, and seven of them fulfilled the inclusion criteria after full-text revision, as detailed in Additional file 3. This way, 15 studies were included in our review (Fig. 1) [25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39].

The general demographics of the included studies are shown in Table 1. All but one studies were published in English [25,26,27,28,29,30,31, 33,34,35,36,37,38,39], and most of them assessed a broader population than only patients undergoing foot and ankle surgery [25,26,27,28,29,30,31, 33, 37,38,39]. Six of 15 studies were carried out in Europe [32, 34,35,36], five [26,27,28,29, 31] in the USA, three [37,38,39] in Asia, and one [30] in Africa. Figure 2 shows the date of publication of studies separated by continent. Below, we present separately the studies that exclusively address patients undergoing foot and ankle surgery (Table 2) and those addressing a broader population (Table 3).

Publication date of studies by continent

Only four [17, 32, 34,35,36] of the 15 studies included patients undergoing foot and ankle surgery exclusively. Three [34,35,36] of these four studies were conducted in the UK and one [32] in Germany. Three [34,35,36] were observational studies, and one [32] had a quasi-experimental design. The included patients ranged from 56 [32] to 161 [35]. Regarding the primary outcome of each study, two evaluated the length of stay [34, 36], one evaluated the knowledge growth [32], and the other mainly assessed the readability and understanding of the preoperative information sheets [35]. The main characteristics, the evaluated education intervention, and the principal conclusions of the included studies assessing patients undergoing foot and ankle surgeries are shown in Table 2.

Overall, these four studies reported positive results: Speirs et al. [35] concluded that preoperative information sheets were well received by patients undergoing foot and ankle surgery, Thomas et al. [36] and Selvan et al. [34] demonstrated that preoperative education—in the form of foot school and a preoperative session respectively—reduced length of stay in the hospital, and Schafer et al. [32] concluded that patients’ knowledge and satisfaction improved with one formal session of preoperative education.

Eleven studies [25,26,27,28,29,30,31, 33, 37,38,39] included patients undergoing orthopedic surgery, including foot and ankle procedures. However, none of these studies presents separate data from patients undergoing specifically foot and ankle surgery, nor specify how many of their included participants underwent foot and ankle surgery.

All of these studies were published in English, three [27, 29, 30] were randomized clinical trials, five [26, 31, 37,38,39] had a quasi-experimental design, and the rest were observational studies [25, 28, 33]. The main characteristics of each study are shown in Table 3 and complemented with more detailed data in Additional file 4.

Regarding the primary outcome reported by each study, four evaluated [30, 37,38,39] the postoperative pain level, two [26, 27] specifically evaluated the use of opioids after surgery, and the others primarily assessed patient expectation [25], compliance [28], satisfaction [29], amount of information received [33], or empowerment [31].