Prehabilitation and Rehabilitation Support
Prehabilitation
Prehabilitation enables people with cancer to prepare for treatment through promoting healthy behaviours, and through needs based prescribing of exercise, nutrition and psychological interventions.
It is the beginning of preparing for treatment which leads into rehabilitation, the post treatment. The aims of prehabilitation are to empower patients to maximise resilience to treatment and long-term health.
The actions patients take now can help with recovery more quickly and reduce the time spent in hospital. Many people are glad to know they can do something immediately to help their health.
Prehabilitation has 3 main areas:
- Physical Intervention
- Nutritional Intervention
- Psychological Intervention
Benefits of Prehabilitation
- Reduce length of stay in hospital.
- Enhance recovery following treatment.
- Reduce post-op complications.
- Provide an opportunity to stop smoking and drinking alcohol.
- Improve fitness.
- Improve nutritional health.
- Enhance quality of life.
Prehabilitation can provide
- Personal empowerment: A sense of control and purpose, which prepares you for surgery and improves your quality of life.
- Physical and emotional strength: An opportunity to improve physical function and emotional wellbeing, which offers resilience to the effects of surgery, enhances the quality of recovery and helps you to live life as fully as you can.
- Long-term health: An opportunity to reflect on the role of healthy lifestyle practices after a cancer diagnosis, to promote positive health behaviour change.
The benefits of prehabilitation can be seen in as little as 2 weeks.
Prehabilitation services in north east London
Download an information leaflet on Maggies Services for patients across north east London.