The STRIVE Before Surgery Trial

Background: The number of people presenting for surgery, and their risk profile, are increasing. People presenting for surgery face substantial risk of postoperative adverse events. Fifteen to 30% of patients suffer a serious medical or surgical complication after surgery, and 1 in 5 develop a new patient-reported disability that reflects a loss of independence in day-to-day life. More than 1.4 million inpatient surgical procedures are performed in Canada each year. Globally, >300 million surgical procedures occur annually. As an increasing number of people present for surgery, the average risk profile of this population is rising. Surgical patients are typically older and live with comorbidity. This means that strategies to improve patient outcomes and reduce resource utilization are urgently needed. Patients, the public, clinicians, and policy makers participating in 2 separate James Lind Alliance Priority Setting Partnerships (Canada & UK) identified prehabilitation as a Top 10 priority for perioperative research. Furthermore, prehabilitation is currently discussed in the popular media as a strategy to improve outcomes for the growing number of high-risk patients presenting for surgery.

Overarching Aim: The full-scale trial will evaluate patient reported disability at 90 days after surgery.

Methods:

Design, setting and participants: The STRIVE Before Surgery Trial is an assessor blinded multicenter individual patient parallel-arm vanguard pragmatic randomized controlled trial.

People => 18 years old having inpatient abdominal, thoracic, pelvic, head-and-neck or vascular surgery with expected length of stay of => 2 days will be included.

Intervention: The intervention includes 3 aspects (exercise, nutrition and breathing). Our intervention is a home-based multimodal prehabilitation program supported through an online platform.

Outcomes and sample size: Primary outcome is patient-reported disability 90 days after surgery. Secondary outcomes are days at home in the 30 days after surgery, patient-reported disability at 30 and 365 days after surgery, survival, health-related quality of life, length of stay, patient safety indicators, intensive care unit admission, non-home discharge, readmission, emergency department visits, health system costs, and elicitation of patient, clinician and researcher-identified barriers to our pragmatic trial using the Theoretical Domains Framework. Our trial sample size calculation is informed by parameter estimates from the pilot phase. A sample of 902 patients (451 per arm) will provide 90% power to detect a 5% minimally important difference between the mean WHODAS scores using an F-test from an Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) at the two-sided 5% significance level. We conservatively assumed a common standard deviation of 23 (equal to the upper limit of the 95% CI observed in our vanguard trial) and a correlation with baseline of 0.3. We also allowed for up to 10% attrition.

Expertise: The team features multidisciplinary clinical and methodological experts, nationally representative knowledge users and patient representatives.

Expected outcomes: Despite systematic review findings that exercise prehabilitation may improve physical performance and function, limitations exist that preclude generalizability, including many identified studies being high or unclear risk of bias and single center studies with <100 participants. The investigators aim to conduct this low risk of bias, mutli-center study of adult surgical patients >18 years to address this gap.

Inclusion criteria

• Age ≥18 years
• Scheduled, or on the pathway, for inpatient abdominal, thoracic, pelvic, head-and-neck or vascular surgery
• Expected surgery date between 3 and 12 weeks from enrollment
• Valid provincial health insurance number
• Access to internet-enabled device
• Email address

Exclusion criteria

• Inability to read and communicate in English
• Cognitive impairment preventing ability to provide informed consent independently
• No telephone/cell phone
• Cardiac, neurological or orthopedic procedure
• Surgery with no curative intent (palliative surgery)
• Patient not interested in participating in the context of their TAPA score
• Any of the following cardiovascular conditions:

• Severe valvular heart disease that limits a patient's ability to ambulate on level ground, or is associated with syncope or dyspnea
• Severe cardiac dysrhythmias that limit a patient's ability to ambulate on level ground, or is associated with syncope or dyspnea
• Recent myocardial infarction (within 6 weeks prior to enrollment - based on the Heart and Stroke Foundation's HeartWalk program)