What is ‘Prehabilitation’?
Prehabilitation is care to help you get as fit as possible while you are going through cancer. This includes improving fitness before an operation but also providing support during treatments such as surgery, radiotherapy, or drug treatment.
Care may also be as simple as providing information on how to stay fit. Specialist support might be offered by trained professionals such as dietitians, physiotherapists or counsellors.
What sort of care is offered as ‘prehabilitation’?
Nutrition
Lung cancer itself and some treatments for lung cancer can make you lose weight or cause difficulties in eating. Nutritional advice may be in the form of information leaflets or online resources. Sometimes more formal assessment is useful, where you may be offered dietary supplements.
Activity
It may be helpful to get advice on improving your fitness. Especially if your general health at the time of diagnosis has impacted your fitness for treatment. Physiotherapy input can be offered such as what exercises you can do to improve muscle fitness or breathing.
Psychological support:
Dealing with a cancer diagnosis is an anxious time for you and your family. There can be extra worry deciding on treatment and coming through treatment, which sometimes have side effects. Your lung cancer nurse specialist and the wider lung cancer team will aim to support you. They may direct you to additional support such as:
– community and charity groups
– referral for counselling
– formal psychological assessment.
Smoking cessation
If you are a smoker, it will improve your lung fitness for treatment if you stop smoking. This is especially important if surgery is planned. Continuing to smoke can also have a negative effect on coping with radiotherapy and drug treatments. Both your GP and your hospital lung cancer team can direct you to smoking cessation services to support you in stopping.
Symptom control
Your previous medical conditions or your new diagnosis of lung cancer may be causing symptoms such as pain, coughing, or breathlessness. Improving these symptoms will help you to feel better and will help you to cope with cancer treatment. Your GP and your hospital lung cancer team will assess your symptoms and work with you on addressing these. This may include referral to the hospital specialist palliative care (symptom control) team.
