Engagement to support Elective Care Recovery
Recovering elective care services to pre-pandemic levels is a key priority, ensuring that patients receive timely access to essential treatments, diagnostics, and procedures. While efforts are focused on reducing long waits, particularly for cancer diagnosis and treatment, local challenges such as staffing levels and patients who have not yet come forward for care remain.
Public involvement is essential in helping shape a recovery plan that meets the needs of all patients. By sharing experiences, raising awareness, and taking part in surveys, consultations, and other forms of public engagement, individuals can support improvements in access to elective care.
Elective recovery is not just about reducing waiting lists, it’s about ensuring fair, timely, and effective care for all. Your voice can help shape how services are delivered now and in the future.
Surgical Prehabilitation: Prepare to Recover
Supporting better surgical outcomes: Helping patients move from passively waiting to actively preparing for surgery
The Prepare to Recover programme is a collaboration between the therapy and anaesthetic teams at Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals (ASPH), delivering patient-centred, needs-based prehabilitation in the local community.
The focus is on early screening, recognition, and optimisation of key perioperative risk factors. These include chronic health conditions, physical fitness, nutrition, and psychological wellbeing. The programme helps patients take an active role in their recovery journey before surgery even begins.
Why prehabilitation matters
The program addresses the challenges posed by long waiting times for surgery, which can lead to a decline in patients' physical strength and overall wellbeing. By ensuring patients are medically optimised, physically stronger, and psychologically prepared, the program aims to facilitate a smoother recovery process. This is achieved through various methods, including:
- Structured exercise circuits to improve strength and mobility
- Bite-size Surgery School sessions providing essential education and guidance.
Patient feedback and experiences
Participants in the Prepare to Recover programme are encouraged to provide feedback on their experiences. The overall satisfaction rating is an impressive 4.75 out of 5, with all participants stating they would recommend the programme to others.
A sense of normality: Improving my confidence and wellbeing
I prefer coming here, definitely not the hospital. It gives me a sense of normality. I spent a lot of time in the hospital. But this is normal, normal people. In the hospital, you're still there, surrounded by sick people.
Coming here made me feel better. I'm old school, I don't do depression, but I was emotional. This helps. It gets me healthy and back to normal. I don't get emotional anymore like before. I come here, I do my work, and it’s all beneficial because I’m not dwelling on the past, it doesn’t worry me anymore.
Group sessions made me realise I’m not alone. I had previously thought my pain, poor posture, and limitations in movement were worse than they actually were. I’ve learned that exercising regularly will help. I feel well prepared for surgery.
I was nervous at first, but the team are amazing! Thank you so much. I now feel more confident walking into a gym. Hopefully, if my surgery is soon, I will join up and next year, there will be no stopping me!
B. and T.’s story: Regaining control over their health journey
Names anonymised for confidentiality
This whole experience has been really worthwhile. We were unsure at first, but when we were told he wouldn’t survive the surgery in his current state, we knew we had to try. Now, we can see the benefits. Since coming here, everything has improved—his cholesterol and blood sugar levels have dropped from double figures to five or six. He is sleeping better, and even the sleep apnoea clinic was impressed.
We don’t have a surgery date yet, but we are preparing. A few years ago, when he had his first surgery, we thought we would just go in, have it done, rest at home, and get back to normal. But things did not go as planned. The surgery went wrong, and he was put into a coma. In those situations, everything stops. You put all your trust in the doctors and nurses, and you feel powerless.
Now, thanks to this programme, we have a completely different mindset. We feel in control. He is in control. He is managing his fitness, weight, and diet. Of course, things can still go wrong, but the risks have been reduced. And if something does happen, we know it’s not because he wasn’t prepared. There will be no ‘what ifs.’ We have done everything we can, and that gives us peace of mind. Even for me, as his partner, it has lifted a weight off my shoulders. I no longer feel guilty, wondering if I should have pushed him to do more. We are in this together, and we are ready.
The Prepare to Recover programme exemplifies how prehabilitation can empower patients, fostering a sense of control and confidence as they approach surgery. The positive feedback and transformative experiences shared by participants underscore the program's effectiveness in preparing individuals for both surgery and recovery.