Increasing Attendance to Cardiac Rehab
The Background
Cardiac Rehabilitation after a Myocardial Infarction of heart attack is very beneficial. In fact it is estimated that attending cardiac rehab reduces mortality 26%. Therefore for every four people who attend cardiac rehab after a heart attack, one additional person will survive.
“Yeah, they said I should go to rehab, but I feel fine now”
-Cardiac Patient, age 66
“We need to do something that will be effective, but won’t require extra staff”
The Problem
Despite the well known benefits of cardiac rehab, many patients who have had a cardiac event choose not to attend. In Hunter New England, only around 45% of referred patients take part in cardiac rehab. In collaboration with the University of Newcastle, Hunter New England Health wanted to conduct a pilot study to improve cardiac rehab attendance.
What Worked
Examining the problem from both an academic and a clinical angle, we decided we needed an intervention that could be realistically implemented without additional staff or health service burden, but would also clearly answer the research question: does this make a difference?
We worked with the collaboration to design and implement a program of automated reminder postcards, seemingly from the patients’ admitting cardiologists, reminding them of their cardiac rehab referral and recommending they attend. Patients were randomised on discharge to either receive the intervention or receive treatment as usual. We used behavioural principles of temporal moments of intervention, assumed authority and simple reminders to maximise the likelihood that patients who received the intervention would attend cardiac rehab.
The Result
In this collaboration we worked with a research team to clarify the moment of intervention, design an innovative intervention that could be realistically implemented into a health care system, and work within the structure of a randomised controlled trial.
We are excited about the promising results of the study, which are in preparation for publication.