04.11.19
NHS Foundation Trust urges people to join free pulmonary rehabilitation programme
Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust (EPUT) are encouraging people with lung disease to take part in free activity and advice sessions.
Individuals suffering from lung disease in West Essex can “dramatically improve their lives” by benefitting from EPUT ran sessions offering advice and support.
The new programme offers each person 12 two-hour sessions of tailored physical exercise and information to help them to manage their condition on a day to day basis.
The Trust is using a national health campaign to encourage people with long-term health conditions such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), asthma and bronchiectasis to ask their GPs to refer them to the local pulmonary rehabilitation programme.
Improvements have been made to the programme and it will now reach more people than ever, helping them to feel better and further understand their condition and symptoms.
The twice-weekly sessions, held at Saffron Walden Community Hospital, St Margaret’s Hospital in Epping and Latton Bush near Harlow, also include beginning and end-of-programme physical health checks and a mental health assessment for each patient.
Sally Wood, the programme’s clinical lead physiotherapist, said:
“If we can build up each person’s exercise tolerance and develop their muscles, we know that this will help with their ability to walk further and help them feel less tired and breathless when carrying out day-to-day activities.”
“Although the sessions cannot cure a patient, they enable them to better manage their condition themselves instead of relying solely on external care.”
Successful beneficiaries of this programme include a woman suffering from COPD who lost almost two stone an another who mastered flights of stairs without stopping for breath through help from the sessions.
Another man with interstitial lung disease was able to build up his fitness to the point where he could undergo a successful double lung transplant.
The campaign also provides exercises to do at home to build on classroom progress, aiming to empower those who are less active to start to carry out healthy lifestyles.