Limitations
RECRUITMENT
The availability of funding and personnel limited the undertaking of recruitment and intervention to one day per week for the duration of this study. This limited our ability to recruit participants who were unwell or fasting for surgical intervention on that scheduled day of recruitment. Therefore, if a patient was unwell on that day, they may not have had another opportunity to participate prior to discharge from hospital. Similarly, if a patient was for discharge on that day, they were more likely to decline participation. As such, our recruitment rate was short of our pre-planned acceptability level.Another challenge for ongoing follow-up of participants was the government issued travel and hospital visitation restrictions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Our method for mitigation of this challenge was utilising virtual or telehealth modes of communication which enabled us to achieve high levels of survey completion in the follow up period. We were unable to use telehealth to provide home exercise supervision or monitoring of compliance for this project. This was reliant on demonstration or exercises on initial review and patient report of compliance throughout.