Transplant Wellness Program

Summary

Wellness is defined as the active pursuit of activities, choices and lifestyles that lead to a state of overall health. Prehabilitation, or using rehabilitation in the period before surgery, can improve the pre, during, and post operative experience for the patient. Although exercise as prehabilitation has been well established in organ transplant, the investigators believe a multiphase approach will help to better serve patients and support patient wellness in the long-term. Supporting wellness behaviour change, such as exercise, stress reduction, and sleep, is associated with improved quality of life (QoL), mood, and improvements in well-being. Including behaviour change support in an exercise program can help support transplant patients in long-term positive lifestyle changes. The Transplant Wellness Program (TWP) is an exercise behaviour change program that includes additional wellness components such as nutrition, stress reduction, and sleep programs to support overall health and QoL of transplant patients. Specifically, the TWP will implement physical activity and behaviour change support for patients pre- and post-transplant surgery, addressing functional (frailty, indices of fitness, physical activity levels) and mental (anxiety, stress) outcomes to improve overall QoL. The TWP includes a 12-week exercise program that is delivered either pre-transplant or post-transplant, depending on length of time from study enrollment to transplant surgery. In addition to the exercise intervention, the TWP includes maintenance resources (access to group exercise classes, wellness webinars, group wellness coaching etc.), and wellness behaviour change support. The goal of the TWP is to improve outcomes of participants throughout their transplant journey, as well as reduce health services use. Collected outcomes will include program reach, effectiveness measures such as changes in physical fitness, adoption by healthcare practitioners, implementation of the program, and maintenance. In addition, will also collect health care use measures as the investigators believe the TWP will result in the reduction of several health care use outcomes, such as the number of hospital admissions (including intensive care unit admissions), length of hospital stays and emergency room utilization.

Conditions

• Transplantation

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Transplant Wellness Program - Kidney and Liver

The exercise prescription for the intervention will be multimodal, , will follow current chronic disease exercise guidelines, and will be tailored to meet the unique needs of each participant. . All participants will receive two 30-45-minute individual session with a CEP during their first week and two additional sessions during the second week if needed. The individual sessions will be followed by group sessions. Each participant will get a total of 24 individual and group sessions combined. These sessions can be conducted either in-person or online, based on participant preference and TWP logistics. For aerobic-based activities, a moderate rate of perceived exertion of 4-6 on a scale of 0-10 will be used. Resistance exercise will begin with functional movements and bodyweight exercises targeting major muscle groups with modifications for beginners and exercise progressions when deemed. Balance and flexibility training activities will also be included.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• University of Calgary

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Stefan Mustata, MD · University of Calgary

Study Design

Allocation

NON_RANDOMIZED

Purpose

SUPPORTIVE_CARE

Masking

NONE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2023-11-16

Primary Completion

2033-11-30

Completion

2033-11-30

Countries

• Canada

Study Locations