Table 1 Review in- and exclusion criteria

Population

Patients from any country undergoing elective surgery

Patients undergoing emergency surgery or non-surgical treatments (e.g. chemotherapy)

Intervention

A preoperative prehabilitation programme (any setting), defined as a (set of) intervention(s) aimed at optimising functioning and reducing disability in individuals awaiting surgery. The intervention(s) had to include at least one component of physio- or occupational therapy and at least one in-person meeting between the patient(s) and health care professional(s). The ‘dose’, i.e. the programme’s duration (overall and per session) and frequency, had to be sufficiently long^a to have an effect if the patients fully adhered to it

Purely medical/nutritional interventions, an intervention combined with additional postoperative rehabilitation, cognitive behaviour therapy or health counselling/education alone, purely web/app-based prehabilitation programmes

Control

Usual preoperative care as defined by the study authors, i.e. the routine care that patients with a given condition receive in the respective hospital (extended only by the baseline measurements performed as part of the trial)

Another prehabilitation intervention; no comparator

Outcome

Clinical effectiveness and costs, any timeframe for follow-up

Clinical effectiveness only

Study type

Full (i.e. cost–benefit, cost-effectiveness and cost–utility analyses) or partial economic evaluations (i.e. cost-minimization analysis), trial-based^b or model-based economic evaluations regardless of their status^c, cost perspective, publication year, language and type (i.e. full article, conference abstract)

Systematic reviews, simple, non-comparative cost analyses (i.e. studies that only calculated the costs of the intervention), commentaries/letters, animal studies