Turning a challenge into an opportunity: pulmonary rehabilitation and socioeconomic deprivation

The efficacy of pulmonary rehabilitation has been established for people with COPD such that the addition of further controlled clinical trials comparing pulmonary rehabilitation with usual care is considered unnecessary.1 2 How well the degree of health benefit reported within clinical trials of pulmonary rehabilitation translates into real-life settings is more difficult to ascertain. In real-world clinical environments, the effectiveness of pulmonary rehabilitation for people with COPD is likely to be confounded by heterogeneity in national healthcare systems, structure and staffing of rehabilitation programmes and participant characteristics of those referred to, accessing and completing pulmonary rehabilitation. While pragmatic clinical trials might provide local intelligence on pulmonary rehabilitation effectiveness, census-level surveys of clinical outcomes and sociodemographic data or pulmonary rehabilitation registries, such as those established in the USA3 and proposed in Australia4 permit associations between service provision, demographic characteristics and clinical outcomes...
Source: Thorax - Category: Respiratory Medicine Authors: Tags: Editorial Source Type: research