Understanding prehabilitation

Watch our video, enjoy the knowledge check and learn more about benefits of prehabilitation. Keep scrolling to see the research.

Promoting
prehabilitation

As a healthcare professional, you can enhance your patients’ care by promoting prehab and highlighting any lifestyle or medical factors that might increase the risks of their treatment.

Supporting
self-management

Patients want to manage their own health and wellbeing. You can help them access structured individual and group support, self-management programs and offer routes to peer support.

Providing
personalised care

Effective prehab is personalised, empowering and delivered through targeted patient education and structured pathways. Engaged patients may be more open to further support.

Watch our video

Effective prehabilitation helps patients recover quicker and have a better quality of life before, during and after treatment.

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Impact on recovery

Research shows that prehabilitation helps patients recover better

This is best evidenced in a surgical setting, where postoperative complications are now the main source of deaths.

Click on the four tabs below to see the impact of prehab on recovery.

Professionals working with patients who are preparing for treatment have the opportunity and responsibility to inform, advise and signpost patients to access prehabilitation support.

MECC

Making Every Contact Count...

As healthcare professionals, it is important to speak with patients about their wellbeing.

A consistent approach during treatment can help patients make the changes they need to reduce the risk and manage the demands of treatment.

COM-B Model of Behaviour Change

Several factors influence whether someone is more or less likely to make changes that will lead to better health.

Helping patients consider their personal ‘barriers’ and ‘facilitators’ to engaging with prehab support can lead to greater success.

Visualised in the video, the COM-B Model thinks about behaviour change as an interaction between Capability, Opportunity and Motivation.

This model suggests that whilst healthcare professionals can and should build patients' motivation for change, it tends to come and go!

The more we do to help someone build capability and opportunity, the more likely it is that whatever motivation is present will lead to change.

Socioeconomic deprivation is a powerful determinant of health.

Patients from more deprived backgrounds are both more likely to develop health problems and more at risk of developing chronic health conditions and undertaking health behaviours that increase their risk.

This often means that they are simultaneously most in need of prehab support whilst finding it hardest to reach or grasp, which may leave us feeling that there is little we can do to influence the wider situation.

Understanding the challenges your patients are facing is a crucial step towards positive lifestyle change.

We can then signpost to relevant services to increase opportunity and capability for change.