Effectiveness, Attendance, and Completion of an Integrated, System-Wide Pulmonary Rehabilitation Service for COPD: Prospective Observational Study

Pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) is one of the most effective treatments for COPD but not widely available. Uptake is poor and completion rates are low. In this integrated PR service we report on effectiveness, attendance, and completion of twice weekly rolling recruitment and once weekly cohort recruitment programmes in two hospital and five community PR sites. The hospital and two of the community programmes were 'rolling' recruitment twice weekly for 8 weeks. Three community programmes ran in once weekly cohorts for 8 weeks. Predictors of attendance, completion and effectiveness were sought. 1114 eligible COPD patients were referred. 812 (73%) attended assessment, 656 (59%) started and 441 (40%) completed. Significant improvements were seen in incremental shuttle walk test (ISWT) (mean 68.3 m; 95% CI 59.3-77.4), Chronic Respiratory Questionnaire self-report dyspnoea scale (CRQ-SR) (0.94; 0.80-1.07), Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale anxiety (0.9; 0.5-1.2) and depression (1.1; 0.8-1.4) components, exceeding the minimum clinically important difference for ISWT and CRQ-SR. Twice weekly compared with once weekly programmes showed similar improvement. Patients were less likely to complete if they were deprived (4th quintile of deprivation 0.56; 0.33-0.94, 5th quintile 0.57; 0.34-0.85), reported MRC dyspnoea scale 4 (0.61; 0.37-0.97) or 5 (0.39; 0.16-0.93), or had been referred by their general practitioner (0.42; 0.24-0.74) (pseudo R-2 0.103). PR is effective for COPD in real-world practice achieving results comparable to trials. Low rates of attendance and completion of PR were not explained by demographic characteristics, disease severity, psychological morbidity and source of referral despite the large number of participants.