Grant: Catalyst Grant: SPOR Innovative Clinical Trials (iCT)

Physical movement within hours of having heart surgery has been shown to help patients feel better faster. This leads to a quicker recovery with earlier hospital discharge and better quality of life. It is safe for patients to move within hours of heart surgery. Physical movement can be using a special bike while still lying in a hospital bed, or walking. Currently, there is not one best way to get patients moving and it is not something that is always done in the hospital. We would like to work with people who have had heart surgery, their families, and the hospital staff to figure out the best ways to get patients moving very soon after surgery. We are very interested in developing new, real-world solutions using ideas from patients, their families and hospital staff. We would like to hear, and learn, from patients and their families, about their own experiences regarding getting moving again after surgery, and their ideas about what would have helped them to get moving sooner. We would like to know what they consider as important when evaluating different ways of encouraging early movement. We also want to hear from hospital staff about what helps them to get their patients moving sooner after surgery. We will bring all these insights together to plan ways to get patients moving within hours after heart surgery and then test these ideas to see if, and how, they work in the hospital setting. Then we will plan for a bigger study to test which intervention works the best. Interventions will be evaluated using factors that patients and their families have said are important to them. Using these interventions to help patients move sooner after heart surgery will support a quicker recovery and lead to a better quality of life.