[Patient education and exercise in cardiac rehabilitation].

Cardiac rehabilitation includes all the activities implemented for the cardiac patient to gain his/her condition prior to the disease. World Health Organization accepted that cardiac rehabilitation is one of the main components of management of cardiac patients. Although activities of cardiac rehabilitation have begun in 1970s in our country, its level is lower than it should have to be especially with regards to patient education. Cardiac rehabilitation has ten main components, including patient assessment, nutritional counseling, lipid management, hypertension management, smoking cessation, weight management, diabetes management, psychosocial management, physical activity counseling, and exercise training. For all of these components, patient education is essential. In patient education, the fact that patient is adult, learning needs, learning type, readiness to learn and stage of behavioral change should be taken into consideration. As one of the most important factors affecting the quality of life, exercise is thought to be very important in all cardiac rehabilitation programs. In exercise prescription, the type, intensity, rate of progression of the intensity and duration of the exercise should be planned according the patient. In this article, patient education and exercise in the context of cardiac rehabilitation are covered.