Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

ICS Travel Awards Cardiac rehabilitation programs have been shown to reduce mortality rates and improve the health status and overall quality of life of patients who have experienced cardiovascular events. However, less than 40% of patients attend cardiac rehabilitation programs in Manitoba. One issue that limits cardiac rehabilitation enrollment is the long wait period for entry into the program, which is influenced by readiness of patients and program start dates. This is an issue because during this wait period, patients may become fearful of participating in physical activity, which may exacerbate their cardiovascular deconditioning. Therefore, there is a need to develop strategies to enroll patients into cardiac rehabilitation sooner. One strategy to improve patient enrollment in cardiac rehabilitation is to allow patients to continuously enter the program soon after referral to cardiac rehabilitation. Therefore, we have developed a study to compare the long-term effectiveness of the "continuous entry" program model and the traditional cardiac rehabilitation program model. Our goal is to determine whether the continuous entry program model is more effective than the traditional cardiac rehabilitation program for improving the health of patients over a one year period. Furthermore, we will determine whether patient health improves to a greater extent if they enter cardiac rehabilitation after a shorter wait period. We expect that both program models will improve the health status of patients attending cardiac rehabilitation. We also expect that patients enrolled in the continuous entry cardiac rehabilitation model will be healthier and more physically active over the one year period, compared to patients enrolled in the traditional entry program.