Making moves towards active living after hip and knee replacement surgery: A consensus meeting of healthcare providers, fitness leaders and people with lived experience

More than 18,000 people in BC will have a hip or knee replacement this year to treat severe pain and reduced mobility from arthritis. After surgery, most patients will have a short course of physiotherapy and be encouraged to engage in regular physical activity such as walking and cycling. However, our research shows that patients receive inconsistent advice and few supports to help them become more active. In fact, they are less active than guidelines recommend to promote health and less active than their healthy peers. There are community-based programs available to help people be active after surgery but we do not know where they are located or how well they are designed and delivered. Most importantly, we want to learn if these programs are safe and help people to become active after joint replacement surgery. To answer these questions, we propose to search websites and query providers to find programs available in BC and describe program features. We will then bring together researchers, healthcare providers, fitness leaders, and patients for a 1½-day meeting to decide what makes a community-based exercise program safe, easy to access, open to everyone, and helpful for people with a hip or knee replacement.