What considerations led the committee to decide that home-based rehabilitation should be available for heart failure patients?
The committee considered that home-based rehabilitation would have the same effect in reducing hospitalisations as hospital or centre based rehabilitation. Therefore the cost savings of rehabilitation are more likely to be met if home based rehabilitation is made available to aid in increasing the uptake of rehabilitation. The committee also noted that access to cardiac rehabilitation for heart failure patients is currently highly variable and uptake nationally remains low, and that initiating home-based rehabilitation programmes is unlikely to incur as high a cost as hospital/centre-based rehabilitation, particularly if existing cardiac rehabilitation programmes are already in place. Furthermore, the CHF Quality standard (QS9 2016, statement number 7) identified the need for choice of venues and measures such as providing transport when offering rehabilitation programmes to ensure equality of access for all the heart failure population.