Rehabilitation for operated cancer Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust

The project team developed a rehabilitation programme for patients going through lung cancer surgery, to help them better manage their condition and recover more quickly. The programme was delivered in acute and primary care settings, through a combination of practitioner-led classes and peer-to-peer support. It aimed to:

• optimise patient fitness
• support the patient after surgery through educating them about rehabilitation options, smoking cessation and dietary advice
• encourage self-management.

Who was involved

The project involved lung cancer nurses, physiotherapists, dieticians and smoking cessation specialists.

Impact

The intervention group had a re-admission rate of 5.7%, compared to 16.1% for the non-intervention group. The intensive care unit (ICU) admission rate was also lower for the intervention group, at 2.9% compared to 3.2% for the non-intervention group. The mean length of stay on ICU was 1.6 days lower for intervention patients.

The project had a positive impact on everyone involved, through bringing different care providers together and creating a better care pathway for patients undergoing curative lung surgery.

Challenges

The team faced a particular challenge with working with one of the hospitals involved in the programme. Historical communication barriers proved too difficult to overcome in the time available and fewer referrals were received from this hospital than from the other sites.

Recording primary data was another issue for the team. They assumed that accurate and up-to-date primary data would be available on the hospital information system, but this was not the case. Instead they had to create a new database with information sourced through manual searches of patient notes.