Bruno Aleixo spent nine months waiting for surgery, and most of the programme he was given during it was aimed at his legs and his shoulders.
Nothing in the programme is technologically remarkable. The difference is that somebody is looking at the output on a schedule, and knows who they are looking at.
The first fortnight home
Cardiac rehabilitation is meant to be twelve weeks of supervised, graded exercise. For patients two hours from a centre, that has historically meant no rehabilitation at all.
People don’t fail surgery on the heart. They fail it on everything else being nine months weaker.
Nadia Kovač, cardiac physiotherapy
Twelve weeks, graded
The shared-care clinic puts a specialist on a scheduled video link into the local practice, with the practice nurse physically in the room and the monitoring data already on screen.
He was out of intensive care in a day and home in six. “They told me the wait was the work,” he says. “I didn’t believe them.”
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