Pulmonary rehabilitation: Beyond breathing better is a supplementary report detailing the outcomes of the English cohort of patients included in the 2015 pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) clinical audit.
This report was published in November 2017. It is the third of the reports produced from the 2015 audit, following the publication of organisational and clinical audit reports in 2015 and 2016 respectively.
Key recommendations
- Healthcare staff should be aware of the association between completion of PR and better patient outcomes, and:
- prioritise the offer of referral of eligible patients during consultations
- support eligible patients to complete PR programmes wherever possible. This may require specific targeted interventions.
- PR programmes should consider how best to accommodate patients who interrupt programmes as a result of hospital admission, so that they might in due course complete programmes that they have enrolled on.
- Healthcare staff should work with patient support organisations and charities to make patients and the public aware of the beneficial health outcomes resulting from completion of PR, so as to encourage patients to seek referral from their clinical teams.
The report also provides key recommendations for patients, commissioners and ideas for future research.
How to use this report
The report comes in two parts:
- national supplementary report – presenting the key findings and recommendations
- results and data analysis report – containing the full data analyses. The data are presented largely in tabular form, with explanatory notes throughout.
The reports use data extracted from Office for National Statistics (ONS) and Hospital Episode Statistics (HES), and relate to patients who were assessed for or began pulmonary rehabilitation between 12 January and 10 April 2015.
The national supplementary report is relevant to anyone with an interest in COPD and will enable lay people, as well as experts, to understand the outcomes of people who have undergone pulmonary rehabilitation. The full data analyses contained in the results and data analysis report have been made available to the interested reader but it is not necessary to review them to appreciate the key messages.
The report is designed to provide readers with a basis for identifying areas in need of change and to facilitate development of improvement programmes that are relevant not only to services, but also to commissioners and policymakers.
Downloads
National supplementary report
This is the supplementary report. It contains the key findings and recommendations from the data analysed.
Results and data analysis
The full results and data analysis report is available to download, in both one document and component sections.
Quality improvement (QI) focused slide set
A set of slides with a quality improvement focus, containing a selection of the key findings and recommendations, along with some guidance on local QI.