Health Promotion and Exercise Prescription in Primary Health-Care Settings - Rationale and Design of the CAMINEM Program (Let's Walk)

Abstract

Regular physical activity has many public health benefits, but technical and organizational aspects of interventions focused on health-enhancing physical activity are seldom disseminated. Our aim is to describe CAMINEM (Let's Walk) Program study rationale and protocol. This pragmatic study on exercise prescription in primary health-care settings assesses the feasibility of the CAMINEM as a more intensive intervention than physical activity advice-only. It relies on the exercise training principles and the 5As framework for health promotion. Feasibility will be measured using the RE-AIM framework, which targets outcomes at individual and setting level (Reach, Effectiveness/Efficacy, Adoption, Implementation, and Maintenance). Patients affected by non-communicable chronic diseases attending their primary health care team will be invited to participate in a 12-month home-based moderate-intensity aerobic exercise program, counselled by an exercise physiologist. The CAMINEM study could be used as an example of practice-based evidence of exercise prescription in real settings and its outcomes compared with other interventions. Interdisciplinary teamwork and detailed procedures of the intervention are the keystones for its design to be developed in a real context.