Personalized prehabilitation: a health promotion tool to improve surgical outcomes

Advances in the care of surgical patients emphasize the impact of social determinants of health (e.g., age, gender, income, education) on clinical outcomes and the relevance of personalized perioperative care, which can accelerate recovery and reduce complications. The importance of implementing patient-specific health promotion strategies preoperatively is discussed here, and a personalized prehabilitation paradigm that builds on perioperative practices designed to reduce complications and accelerate recovery within the Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS) approach is proposed. The selected actionable domains of health determinants in this paradigm highlight strategies to optimize surgical patients' health and well-being, by identifying medical and nonmedical vulnerabilities, with the goal of improving surgical outcomes. This discussion will help centre perioperative optimization through health promotion as a core tenet of surgical care.