Improving Physical Activity in Rehabilitation

Cardiac rehabilitation is a programme of exercise and health advice for people recovering from heart disease. Pulmonary rehabilitation is a similar programme for people with chronic lung disease. For both groups of patients, taking part in rehabilitation can lead to improvements in health and well-being. However, only 30% of patients complete their agreed rehabilitation programme. This costs the NHS millions of pounds every year. This project aims to investigate whether a motivational-based intervention, underpinned by self-determination theory and motivational interviewing, will enable staff to encourage more patients to take part in physical activity (PA). Staff will be trained with the new communication skills and will then deliver the rehabilitation programme. The session content will not change, just the way in which staff speak to patients. This will be a two-phase study. Phase A will take a qualitative approach collect patient and staff feedback about the current rehabilitation programme, before using this information to develop and pilot the intervention. Phase B will then assess the feasibility of the intervention within cardiac and pulmonary rehabilitation. Participants agreeing to take part in the phase B will be required to complete an interview and questionnaire at three time points. Patients' personal opinions of the programmes will be extremely important in discovering what can be done to improve rehabilitation for future participants. The main objectives will be to look at whether the intervention increases the number of patients taking part in physical activity. The investigators plan to establish how much physical activity patients take part in whilst they are in rehabilitation, as well as once they have left the programme. This is why participants will be interviewed three and six months after they have finished their rehabilitation programme.