Uptake and adherence of women post myocardial infarction to phase III cardiac rehabilitation: are things changing?

Abstract

Women are poorly represented in research literature in Cardiac Rehabilitation (CR). Furthermore, women appear not to accept CR and often drop out of programmes early. Three large cardiac rehabilitation programmes in the west of Scotland were involved in this study. The west of Scotland continues to have some of the highest incidence of coronary heart disease (CHD) in the UK. These centres provided information on referral and recruitment patterns of women into phase III CR post myocardial infarction (MI), comparing two consecutive years. Comparison of the two years’ uptake of women eligible for the phase III CR of the centres, shows an increase at one centre of 23.7% in uptake. The other two centres saw a reduction of 15.3% and 4.6% uptake. The findings suggest that many women continue not to accept phase III CR. Once women were enrolled in the programmes all centres saw more women completing the phase III CR, one centre improving by 19.3% and the others by 8.8% and 9.4%. If recruitment and adherence to CR phase III are to improve for women, different strategies including the CR programme structure, gender specific information, environment and implementing behavioural change are required to address ‘women specific’ issues.