Abstract
Purpose
Surgical prehabilitation aims to reduce a decline in the functional capacity thereby optimising health and fitness before surgery. One of the major barriers in successfully implementing a prehabilitation program in hospitals has been poor patient adherence. In our pilot survey on surgical patients, we sought to explore patient preferences regarding the program design, the barriers and enablers to patient participation in a multimodal prehabilitation program.
Methods
The survey was administered to patients undergoing major abdominal surgery in the preoperative period. The first two parts of the instrument mainly included questions on demographics, social history, activity levels, interest towards prehabilitation program and their involvement in co-design, preferences towards the components of the program, the barriers and enablers. The last part of survey included symptom and physical assessments.
Results
The survey was completed by 24 patients undergoing major abdominal surgery. The median age of our cohort was 71 (range 35–91) years and 75% were retired. 75% of our participants were extremely interested in improving health and fitness and 63% were very keen to co-design their program when explained. Home-based programs were preferred by most participants and among exercises, walking was preferred by 71% of the participants. One third of the participants were interested in professional dietary counselling. There were only two participants who preferred group psychological therapy while 25% preferred individual psychological counselling sessions.
Conclusion
Our survey highlighted a need to design a personalised program with tailored interventions due to the wide variation in the interest and preferences among surgical patients.
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Data availability statement
The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the preadmission clinic nurses at The Prince Charles Hospital for helping us by administering the survey. We would like to acknowledge the contributions from Dr. Harish Iswariah and Mr. Peter Hancock for their initial involvement in the discussions.
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The authors declare that no funds, grants, or other support were received during the preparation of this manuscript.
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by UG and CS. The first draft of the manuscript was written by UG and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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This study was performed in line with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. Approval was granted by the Ethics Committee of The Prince Charles Hospital (HREC/18/QPCH/114; dated 19/4/2018).
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Gurunathan, U., Tronstad, O. & Stonell, C. Patient characteristics and preferences for a surgical prehabilitation program design: results from a pilot survey. J Cancer Res Clin Oncol 149, 1361–1367 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00432-022-04420-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00432-022-04420-4