However, many home-based program models have required multiple home visits from health professionals and are therefore expensive to run, resulting in limited uptake in the clinical setting. A large study, powered for equivalence, has recently shown similar outcomes for self-monitored home pulmonary rehabilitation and hospital-based outpatient pulmonary rehabilitation for people with moderate to severe ON 1910 COPD (Maltais et al 2008). If these benefits of home-based, unsupervised pulmonary rehabilitation can be reproduced at a reasonable cost, this may be a feasible method for overcoming one important barrier to attendance at outpatient

pulmonary rehabilitation programs. Fifteen out of 18 participants who did not complete the program reported that becoming unwell had affected their ability to participate. Surprisingly few of these participants had an exacerbation of their lung condition, with other medical conditions reported more frequently. Most patients undergoing pulmonary rehabilitation have one or more comorbidities and this may limit the benefits that can be attained, even in those who can complete the program (Crisafulli et al 2008). Pain related to other medical conditions was the most commonly reported comorbidity influencing completion in this study. The pain experiences in people with COPD have

been studied infrequently, with most data gathered from people with endstage disease (Lohne et al 2010). The www.selleckchem.com/products/AG-014699.html current study suggests

that pain may be experienced by people with COPD across the range of disease severity and should be taken into account during program design and patient assessment. Alternative models for pulmonary rehabilitation such as water-based exercise (Rae and White 2009) may be appropriate for some patients in whom pain limits participation. Given that most of those participants who could not complete the program ascribed high value to pulmonary rehabilitation and expressed a desire to complete it in the future, flexible program models are required that allow those who become unwell to rejoin a suitable pulmonary rehabilitation when they are able Megestrol Acetate to do so. A strength of this study is that a significant number of participants who chose not to attend pulmonary rehabilitation at all were included. These patients have been included infrequently in previous studies and this is the largest study examining barriers to uptake of a clinical pulmonary rehabilitation program which is representative of usual care (Arnold et al 2006, Fischer et al 2007). Themes emerging from this study show that while most of the barriers to uptake are similar to those for completion, a lack of perceived benefit has an important role in the decision to commence a pulmonary rehabilitation program; this theme was much less evident amongst non-completers, who had some experience of attending a pulmonary rehabilitation program.