Why the study?
Characteristics and program utilization among women electing to participate in mixed-sex, women-only, or home-based cardiac rehabilitation models had not been compared.
Does women-only or home-based cardiac rehabilitation improve program utilization compared to mixed-sex cardiac rehabilitation in women?
Does women-only or home-based cardiac rehabilitation improve program utilization compared to mixed-sex cardiac rehabilitation in women?
Women-only cardiac rehabilitation models did not improve session adherence compared to mixed-sex models, and home-based models had lower completion rates, highlighting the need to optimize accessibility and engagement for women.
Caution against assuming women-only or home-based models improve utilization; leaves open optimal cardiac rehabilitation design for women.
This study compared characteristics and program utilization in women electing to participate in mixed-sex, women-only, or home-based cardiac rehabilitation (CR). In this retrospective cohort study, electronic records of CR participants in Toronto who were offered the choice of program model between January 2017-February 2020 were analyzed. There were 727 women (74.7% mixed, 22.0% women-only, 3.3% home-based) who initiated CR. There were significantly more women who were not working in women-only than mixed-sex (80.4% vs 64.1%; P = .009). Session adherence was significantly greater with mixed-sex (58.8 ± 28.9% sessions attended/25) than women-only (54.3 ± 26.3% sessions attended/25; P = .046); program completion was significantly lower with home-based (33.3%) than either supervised model (59.7%; P = .035). Participation in women-only CR may be less accessible. Further research is needed to investigate offering remote women-focused sessions or peer support.
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Heald et al. (2022) studied this question.
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