Moving to Better Health (MTBH) is a project that aimed to help people living with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) to improve the self-management of their condition by supporting them to understand and improve their everyday physical activity. This project offered a personalised and guided online intervention from KiActiv® to empower participants to increase physical activity within their everyday lives.
Through the Future Challenge Programme, we support innovators and local partners to pilot innovations and validate them in a real-world setting. In this case we brought Sirona Care and Health (Sirona) together with innovator KiActiv® to support some of Sirona’s COPD patients to increase physical activity within their everyday lives.
The respiratory team at Sirona annually receive around 1000 -1200 referrals of patients with COPD from within the Bristol region. The ‘gold standard’ activity-based intervention is a gym based six-week pulmonary rehabilitation course (PR). This is a supervised programme of exercise training, health education and breathing techniques. However, for diverse reasons, some that centre around logistics or self-esteem issues, only around 350 patients annually complete a course of PR.
Between February 2020 and January 2021, adult patients referred to Sirona with a confirmed diagnosis of COPD were introduced to KiActiv® Health. Interested patients were referred directly to KiActiv® and 52 patients completed the 12 weeks KiActiv® Health programme.
The results from the evaluation, carried out by the South West AHSN, indicate that the use of KiActiv® Health in this way can have a positive impact for some patients with COPD. This project has identified a number of areas that would benefit from further exploration.
- Further analysis of individual physical activity profiles over time, taking into account environmental factors such as pollution levels and weather conditions, to understand the impact of these factors on the COPD population.
- Analysis of the uptake of virtual or face-to-face PR by patients who completed the 12-week KiActiv® Health programme would also be useful to understand its potential impact.
- The West of England AHSN business development team will continue to support KiActiv® to further explore opportunities for the product in COPD and other long-term conditions.
This project has provided an opportunity to demonstrate effective collaborative working across NHS organisations and industry, resulting in key learnings for future partnerships.
