Transplant Wellness Program

Wellness is defined as the active pursuit of activities, choices and lifestyles that lead to a state of overall health. Prehabilitation, or using rehabilitation in the period before surgery, can improve the pre, during, and post operative experience for the patient. Although exercise as prehabilitation has been well established in organ transplant, the investigators believe a multiphase approach will help to better serve patients and support patient wellness in the long-term. Supporting wellness behaviour change, such as exercise, stress reduction, and sleep, is associated with improved quality of life (QoL), mood, and improvements in well-being. Including behaviour change support in an exercise program can help support transplant patients in long-term positive lifestyle changes. The Transplant Wellness Program (TWP) is an exercise behaviour change program that includes additional wellness components such as nutrition, stress reduction, and sleep programs to support overall health and QoL of transplant patients. Specifically, the TWP will implement physical activity and behaviour change support for patients pre- and post-transplant surgery, addressing functional (frailty, indices of fitness, physical activity levels) and mental (anxiety, stress) outcomes to improve overall QoL. The TWP includes a 12-week exercise program that is delivered either pre-transplant or post-transplant, depending on length of time from study enrollment to transplant surgery. In addition to the exercise intervention, the TWP includes maintenance resources (access to group exercise classes, wellness webinars, group wellness coaching etc.), and wellness behaviour change support. The goal of the TWP is to improve outcomes of participants throughout their transplant journey, as well as reduce health services use. Collected outcomes will include program reach, effectiveness measures such as changes in physical fitness, adoption by healthcare practitioners, implementation of the program, and maintenance. In addition, will also collect health care use measures as the investigators believe the TWP will result in the reduction of several health care use outcomes, such as the number of hospital admissions (including intensive care unit admissions), length of hospital stays and emergency room utilization.