PRIORITY-CONNECT 2 Pilot Trial

The provision of preoperative interventions (prehabilitation: including exercise, nutrition, and psychological treatment) have been reported to reduce postoperative complications by as much as 50% and reduce hospital stay by up to 4 days compared to standard of care. Postoperative multimodal interventions are likely to further benefit patients facing new challenges (e.g. stoma care), and reduce post discharge complications.

Therefore the Virtual Multimodal hub of PRIORITY-CONNECT 2 Pilot Trial aims to primarily; determine the feasibility of incorporating a virtual multimodal program into the preoperative and postoperative period for patients undergoing gastrointestinal cancer surgery, the acceptability to patients, clinicians and carers of the virtual multimodal program and the acceptability to patients of being randomised to the virtual multimodal program or usual care.

The secondary aim is to obtain pilot data on the likely difference in key outcomes (30 days postoperative complications, quality of life, days at home and alive at 30 days - DAH30, implementation outcomes and cost outcomes) to inform the development of a substantive randomised clinical trial.