[Commentary] For patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) has demonstrated improvements in physiological measures(1), patient-reported outcomes(2), and health economic indices(3). There is also a growing body of evidence around improvements in frailty(4) sedentary behaviour(5) and social-connectedness(6). The clinical need for alternative delivery modes of programmes, such as pulmonary tele-rehabilitation (PTR) has been clearly established in the COVID-19 pandemic, whereby conventional face-to-face programme provision seems an unlikely reality for the foreseeable future. The rapid remodelling of health services as a result of COVID-19 provides an exciting opportunity to reflect about the traditional aims, structure, outcomes and components of conventional PR programmes.Hansen et al(7) in a recent issue of Thorax provide an excellent, concise literature review, in combination with outcomes from their study, which suggest that PTR is certainly no worse than conventional PR for commonly reported patient outcomes and could indeed offer some benefits in terms of programme completion. However, there are limitations which we believe should be highlighted further
