Interventions to promote patient utilisation of cardiac rehabilitation - PubMed

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Clinical practice guidelines recommend cardiac rehabilitation (CR) for secondary prevention of heart disease, but global utilization remains low.
This Cochrane review update assesses interventions to increase CR enrolment, adherence, and completion for eligible cardiac patients.
Primary outcomes include CR programme enrolment, adherence, and completion, with secondary outcomes assessing costs and harms.
47 studies (10,803 participants) were included, primarily from North America and Europe, with most participants being male.
Common intervention strategies tested were education/self-management, alternative delivery models (home/digital/hybrid), invites, peer support, women-only programmes, and financial incentives.
Interventions may increase CR enrolment (RR 1.19, low-certainty evidence) and likely improve adherence (SMD 0.32) and completion (RR 1.22, moderate-certainty evidence).
No significant increase in serious adverse events was observed, and limited data was available on intervention costs.
Evidence certainty was low to moderate due to high heterogeneity across trials.
Funding was provided by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).
Authors declared no competing interests.

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