Background:

Cardiac rehabilitation is a well-known strategy for secondary prevention in several heart diseases and includes a set of strategies based on education of a healthy lifestyle, management of cardiovascular risk factors, psychosocial counseling, and prescription of supervised physical exercise. Several clinical trials, systematic reviews and meta-analyses have documented its efficacy and safety. Nevertheless, cardiac rehabilitation remains underused. There is information available describing the current status of cardiac rehabilitation and the characteristics of centers in some European countries and North America. There are pooled data from South America in 2014, along with reports from Brazil, Colombia, and Uruguay, but there are few data from our country. Therefore, the aim of this study was to determine the current status of cardiac rehabilitation programs in Argentina.

Methods:

We conducted a descriptive study using a virtual questionnaire to evaluate the structure and characteristics of rehabilitation programs in our country and the potential barriers to achieve efficient rehabilitation.

Results:

Seventy-two centers responded. The main results show a high concentration of centers in urban areas (69.23% in AMBA), predominance of private centers (66.67%), inclusion of patients with the so-called classic cardiovascular diseases (coronary artery disease, heart failure, postoperative heart valve surgery, peripheral vascular disease, and after cardiac transplantation and device implantation), and a majority of centers with an exercise-centered strategy. The main difficulty for the inclusion of patients in the centers was poor referral of candidates.

Conclusions:

The data from this survey allows for a diagnosis of the situation and can be the starting point for developing improvement strategies to implement quality standards and future accreditation programs for the centers.