Adherence to cardiac rehabilitation guidelines: a survey of rehabilitation programmes in the United Kingdom

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Abstract
Two key recommendations of recent guidelines are that cardiac rehabilitation requires the skills of a range of professionals and that the patient should receive a menu based programme after an individual assessment of needs.1 A previous survey of 25 cardiac rehabilitation programmes found little congruence with these guidelines and noted that physicians were particularly unlikely to be involved.2 We extended this inquiry to include all of the discoverable rehabilitation programmes in the United Kingdom. We identified 273 cardiac rehabilitation programmes through registers maintained by professional and charitable bodies and conducted a structured telephone interview with the “main coordinator” of 263 (96%) of these programmes between 1 April 1996 and 31 March 1997. If a respondent did not have the competence to answer a particular question the appropriate person was contacted. We asked each participant whether the rehabilitation team included anyone …