Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust continue to support patients with a digitally enhanced approach to pulmonary rehab leading to exciting results.
With face-to-face pulmonary rehabilitation services cancelled due to COVID-19, find out how one NHS Trust continued to support their respiratory patients.
Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust Pulmonary Rehabilitation (Kent CHFT PR) service is a team of highly experienced chartered physiotherapists, specialist rehabilitation assistants and respiratory counsellors, supported by a team of administrators, delivering pulmonary rehabilitation programmes at local community venues.
Through close working relationships with care providers across the patient pathway as well as other community services and resources, the service aims to support patients to achieve effective long-term self-management. Patients with moderate to severe lung disease are offered a tailored programme of exercise, which aims to improve exercise tolerance, reduce symptoms and resultant disability.
In March 2020 all face to face pulmonary rehabilitation was suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Kent CHFT PR team quickly realised the importance of continuing to provide support to their patients despite the restrictions, and they started to explore alternative service delivery models to provide quality care through different mediums to support patients to maintain their health and wellbeing. After reviewing several options, the clinical teams and patient advisors selected the myCOPD app as the favoured option to support a digitally enhanced service delivery model.
Licence distribution commenced in July 2020 and by December 2020 the team had registered 90 patients to use myCOPD as their sole method of PR (11% of patients approached). Of those patients who had completed the programme through myCOPD:
67% (33/49) of patients achieved improvements in exercise capacity (National average is with 65% and for remote delivery 59.8% NACAP, 2019)
68% (49/72) of patients who started the myCOPD programme, finished the 6-week course (National average is 62% NACAP, 2019)
The service has since returned to face-to-face groups, all be it in a different format to the original, to ensure that their service is COVID-19 secure. Therefore, the service has now adopted a mixed model approach for patients willing to attend face-to-face sessions, whereby half their sessions are remote and appropriate patients are offered access to myCOPD. They also continue to offer a fully remote programme for those patients who do not feel comfortable/are unable to attend the face-to-face sessions where again, myCOPD is offered for those who have access to technology.
Once the patient has started on the myCOPD app the team call the patient three times throughout their 6-week rehab programme to answer any questions, guide and motivate as able. They then complete a discharge call where patients are encouraged to continue accessing the app long-term to maintain health benefits.
To date, 125 patients have now been registered, with an 82% activation rate. Of those who have activated:
99% of activated patients accessed education with 2788 views in total.
82% of activated patients accessed PR with 1,286 views in total.
The team at Kent CHFT PR have shown great resilience in the face of the challenges of the last year, continuing to support their patients through a more flexible and accessible service delivery model, whilst maintaining patient outcomes. Menu-based models of care incorporating a digital element provide great promise for enabling teams to rise not only to the challenges of the current climate but to also address pre-COVID-19 challenges such as increasing service capacity, supporting a greater referral to and uptake of PR with more patients going on to complete the course.
If you’d like to find out how the myCOPD app can support your pulmonary rehabilitation service to deliver remote or blended sessions to your respiratory patients, please get in touch here or call my mhealth on +44 (0)1202 299 583.
