Imperial College London (ICL)

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This project aims to understand the clinical needs of patients with Long COVID within North West London. It forms part of a UK-wide project called the LOng COvid Multidisciplinary consortium: Optimising Treatments and servIces acrOss the NHS (LOCOMOTION).

This project aims to understand the clinical needs of patients with Long COVID within North West London. It forms part of a UK-wide project called the LOng COvid Multidisciplinary consortium: Optimising Treatments and servIces acrOss the NHS (LOCOMOTION). Long COVID is a condition that causes some people to continue to feel unwell many weeks after their original COVID-19 infection. Patients may have a wide range of different symptoms, including tiredness, pain, rashes and heart palpitations, and may require many different medical tests or see many different specialist doctors to receive a diagnosis and the treatment they need. As a result, it is likely that some patients may take longer to be diagnosed, or maybe miss being diagnosed at all. Similarly, patients may receive different treatments and may have better or worse clinical outcomes. This project aims to look at how patients with a diagnosis of Long COVID in North West London receive care from their GPs and hospitals. We want to understand the sorts of appointments, clinical tests and treatments patients receive before and after their Long COVID diagnosis and to use this to understand where current services for patients with Long COVID could be improved. We also aim to investigate how the sorts of tests and treatments patients receive vary between patient groups, based on age, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic deprivation, the London Borough they live in and any pre-existing medical conditions they may have. This will give us a deeper understanding of where inequalities in Long COVID care may exist between patient groups and will enable clinicians to better design services in North West London to help those for whom Long COVID services may be working less well. Long COVID is a new condition – it was unknown before the COVID-19 pandemic – and therefore across the country specialist clinics have developed to provide care to patients with Long COVID. Not all clinics operate in the same way and because it is such a new condition it is not yet clear which treatments work best for specific patients. The findings from this project with provide an important indication of how Long COVID care is being delivered across GP and hospital services in North West London and can only be achieved with the linked GP and hospital data available in the Discover-NOW platform. The findings from this project will therefore also inform the way in which Long COVID patients are cared for across the UK as part of the LOCOMOTION network of researchers and clinicians.

16/06/2022

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