The benefits of improving pre-treatment health and physical function outcomes in patients with cancer, musculoskeletal or other conditions are increasingly acknowledged. These are usually translated into improved pre/post treatment outcomes, decreased hospitalisation times, reduction in treatment complications and premature mortality. The term “prehabilitation” is commonly used to describe the pre-treatment exercise-based conditioning aimed to optimise physiological reserve, address modifiable risk factors, and improve treatment and post-treatment outcomes. Patients waiting for a hip and/or knee arthroplasty can experience debilitating symptoms for months or years until they finally receive their surgery and patients with cancer can also receive bouts of chemotherapy or radiotherapy before any invasive interventions. This can cause further limitations in physical function, promote deconditioning, and increase comorbidities particularly in elderly populations. Contemporary prehabilitation programmes involve multimodal approaches including education, aerobic, resistance, functional, nutritional, behavioural chance and other interventions. However, there is conflicting evidence in terms of the optimal approach for delivering prehabilitation programmes.

Supporting patients early on their rehabilitation journey to change their behaviour in terms of increasing their physical activity levels, improve their nutritional options and their self-efficacy, has potential to improve fitness outcomes, functional status, and quality of life. However, due to heterogeneity of studies, lack of evidence, as well as methodological limitations it is still unclear what is the optimal delivery options of multimodal prehabilitation programmes. The aim of this research topic is to provide a knowledge exchange platform to share evidence regarding a) the experiences of patients participating in prehabilitation programmes, b) feasibility and implementations challenges, c) optimal approaches in terms of the frequency, intensity, type, volume, length and mode of delivery and d) also about evidence on the pre-intervention as well as long-term outcomes.

In this special issue we welcome papers of original research such as randomised controlled trials, clinical trials, feasibility studies as well as systematic reviews and meta-analysis, scoping reviews and particularly mixed methods designs and qualitative studies. We invite authors to consider the following topics but not exclusively limited to these:

1. Efficacy and effectiveness of in person or remotely delivered prehabilitation programmes.

2. Innovative approaches that have behavioural change components on the core of the programme.

3. Experiences of patients in relation to participating in prehabilitation programmes, behavioural change, technical challenges, and participation barriers.

4. Focus on pre and post treatment outcomes and also long-term outcomes especially in terms of behavioural change and quality of life.

5. Feasibility, implementation, technological and policy challenges in delivering prehabilitation programmes.

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Frontiers in Rehabilitation Sciences

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