Patients should be screened and assessed for physical activity and physical fitness, nutrition, use of alcohol and tobacco, comorbidities, and psychological support in advance of interventions being commenced.

Patients may have different degrees of risk for any given component of the intervention and therefore may require different levels of support for each element.

Through triage, multiple factors provide an understanding of the complexity of a patient’s health status, guide clinical decisions on individual recommendations and characterise the risk for exercise related complications.  These domains include cardiometabolic status (obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular events such as myocardial infarction or stroke), comorbidities (mental health issues, geriatric issues, autoimmune diseases); treatment toxicities (fatigue, neutropenia, arthralgias, bone metastases) and behavioural characteristics (lack of time, energy, motivation or low self-efficacy).  Screening using these domains enables the provider to identify who can and will benefit from which components of prehabilitation and rehabilitation.

It is important to identify who will need to access what level of services, who can do this and which professionals within different services have the skills and competencies to support patients. Below are some sample case studies of people receiving prehabilitation and/or rehabilitation.