Prehabilitation

We are here to help you on your journey to get you as fit and healthy as we can before you begin your treatment and to understand what is offered in our prehabilitation service.

This is our website with information that can help patients to prepare physically mentally and emotionally for their cancer journey.

We recognise that everyone is different, including their level of health and fitness. This means at the point of cancer diagnosis some individuals will have a high level of fitness, others a low level and most somewhere in between. We want to ensure everyone starts their cancer treatment as fit and as healthy as possible. With the fittest people we can provide assurance that they are doing all that is necessary and answer any questions they may have about what if anything they can do in addition. For those who feel they might benefit from some advice on health and fitness, our website provides information that can help patients to prepare physically mentally and emotionally for their cancer treatment.

This is for patients with a diagnosis of either of the following, and referrals can only be made internally by our clinical teams at Somerset Foundation Trust, but it is the intention to roll this out to all cancer patients and to enable other clinical professionals to be able to refer patients to our service.

Our three pilot areas we are looking to offer this to are:

• Colorectal patients
• Prostate patients
• Lung patients who will receive systemic anti-cancer treatment

If you have been referred to this programme and do not have one of the above diagnosis, this could have been to try to improve your treatment outcome and we thank you for joining this programme.

We are endeavouring to support patients in three key areas to ensure they are in the best of health

1. Exercise
2. Nutrition
3. Wellbeing

The buttons below will take you to our pages that can support you on Exercise, Nutrition, Wellbeing and Lifestyle Support.

There is unmistakable evidence that by enabling people to access a prehabilitation service this can help them to improve their stamina prior to having treatment and aids their recovery. The analogy is often used that you would not get up one day and run a marathon. There will need to be a lot of preparation, both mentally and physically, to go through such an intensive process and this applies to the preparation for surgery and other intensive treatments.

Specifically, with cancer, whilst there is a relatively small timeframe available between diagnosis and the first treatment, there can be significant progress that can be made making a major difference to both patient outcomes and their experience.  The better prepared a patient is for their first treatment, the greater their understanding of what they are likely to experience, the more comfortable and acceptable they will feel and the better the outcome will be.

The graphic below is taken from the Macmillan prehabilitation guidance and shows how, with prehabilitation a patient can receive their treatment and living with and beyond cancer.

Studies have shown evidence that it is important to recognise that physical activity, fitness, nutrition and psychology should be assessed and patients may have different degrees of risk for any given element.  Some patients will have a targeted treatment for one element, specialist for another and universal for another, or, specialist for two and targeted for one.

Patients will have access to a range of digital content on-line as part of the universal offer across the three key areas, and access to face-to-face clinics where needed and appropriate.  We are working with our local leisure centres across the county to enable us to provide an offer close to where a patient lives.