Implementation of a Multimodal Prehabilitation Program in Robotic Oncological Surgery

In the researchers' words

Current literature on prehabilitation is broad and heterogenous. Ploussard et al initiated a multimodal one-day prehabilitation program in patients before robotic radical prostatectomy involving urology nurses, anaesthetic nurses, oncology nurse specialists, anesthesiologists, dieticians, physiotherapists etc, and observed significant improvement in terms of reduction in length of stay, blood loss, and operative time, and an increase in the proportion of ambulant surgery. Santa Mina et al observed that patients following a home-based moderate-intensity exercise prehabilitation program prior to radical prostatectomy were more fit i.e have a greater score on the 6 minutes' walk test, four weeks postoperatively compared to a control group. Regrettably, this study couldn't demonstrate a difference in length of stay or complication rate. To date, evidence for efficacy of prehabilitation in gynaecological cancer patients is limited. Several reviews and a meta-analysis indicate that the level of evidence suggesting that prehabilitation may improve postoperative outcomes is low. Moreover, there is a wide variability in applied preoperative prehabilitation programs i.e, with a uni- or multimodal approach, home-based or supervised, differences in intensity and a variety of outcomes. Therefore, there is a need for randomized controlled trials with low risk of bias and clearly defined…