Approximately two-and-a-half million people are currently living with or beyond cancer in the UK. People undergoing treatment for cancer may experience adverse effects, particularly those who are ‘high-risk’ (e.g., frail and unfit). Prehabilitation aims to enable patients to optimise their physical and psychological conditioning before treatment supporting early discharge, reducing adverse effects of treatment and associated healthcare costs. Currently, the types of measures to screen, assess and measure the impact of prehabilitation and the timepoints at which they are captured vary between studies and services limiting the ability to compare between studies and to pool data. There is a need to develop and consistently employ a range of standardised screening, assessment, and outcome measures. A search of the COMET Initiative database for prehabilitation COS studies returned one completed study focused on colorectal surgery (Pearson et al., 2021) and one ongoing study specific to intra-abdominal cancer (Rammant et al., 2020). Although the results of these studies will be helpful, some measures may not be applicable to studies and services that include a broad range of cancer types and treatment options. A COS used across all cancer prehabilitation research and service delivery will enable findings from different delivery models and designs to be compared and combined. The aim of this study is to design a standard set of outcome measures that should be reported, as a minimum, in cancer prehabilitation research and service evaluation to compare and contrast the impact of different interventions and to combine datasets to assess outcomes at a population level.
Contributors(PI) Dr Tom Parkington, Researcher, Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre, Sheffield Hallam University.
Dr Anna Myers, Senior Research Fellow in Exercise Oncology, Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre, Sheffield Hallam University.
Dr Liam Humphreys, Senior Research Fellow in Exercise Oncology, Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre, Sheffield Hallam University.
Dr John Moore, GM Cancer lead for prehab and recovery, Clinical Head of Division for Anaesthesia, Peri-Operative Medicine and Critical Care Services at Central Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust.
Dr Shaman Jhanji, Consultant in Anaesthetics and Intensive Care Medicine, The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation trust.
Professor Rob Copeland, Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre, Sheffield Hallam University.
Disease Category: Cancer
Disease Name: Cancer
Age Range: 18 - 120
Sex: Either
Nature of Intervention: Any
- Clinical experts
- Consumers (patients)
- Researchers
- COS (Other)
- COS for clinical trials or clinical research
- Consensus meeting
- Delphi process
- Interview
- Systematic review
Stage 1: Scoping review and patient interviews
Stage 2: Establishing a long list of screening, assessment and outcome measures
Stage 3: Prioritisation of outcomes through a Delphi Survey
Stage 4: Final COS agreement