Long Covid global response

Leeds experts pioneer global response to Long Covid

The Leeds Long Covid Rehabilitation service has been recognised for extraordinary and innovative work in the Clinical Leadership Team category of the 2021 BMJ awards. This complements the team’s success in being awarded the 2021 Medipex NHS Clinical Innovation award in the longterm conditions category.

In the early stage of the pandemic, some patients in Leeds continued to struggle for months with ongoing symptoms after Covid infection. The team recognised this and established an integrated rehabilitation pathway with colleagues in Primary Care, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust alongside Leeds Community Healthcare NHS Trust, the University of Leeds, Leeds CCG and the City Council. Since developing the pathway over 1000 adults with Long Covid have been treated. It is a great example of integrated care, with medical specialists from Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust working with a therapy team based in Leeds Community Healthcare Trust, providing specialist assessment and ongoing rehabilitation in one service. Dr Manoj Sivan, Associate Clinical Professor at the University of Leeds and Consultant in Rehabilitation Medicine said: “The team created a novel scale, the COVID-19 Yorkshire Rehabilitation Scale (C19YRS) to capture long-term COVID symptoms. The scale was developed with patients and assesses symptom severity, functional disability and overall health state. It is the first patient reported outcome measure (PROM) in literature for Long COVID. The scale is recommended by NHS England and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), it has been translated in more than 10 languages and is used globally.” Dr Stephen Halpin, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Leeds and Consultant with Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust added: “Developing the Leeds Long Covid service was a multidisciplinary team effort, made up of clinicians and a core therapy team of physiotherapists, occupational therapists and dieticians. Weekly team meetings took place with attendance from consultants in Respiratory Medicine, Rehabilitation Medicine and Cardiology with a Rehabilitation Medicine registrar. Recent evaluation reveals 86% of patients reported an improvement in health related quality of life measures. This demonstrates the impact this service has had in supporting people in Leeds to recover from Long Covid.” The service has been recognised as a national benchmark and the C19YRS scale is used in most Long COVID (LC) services as the only LC specific outcome measure. The World Health Organisation has recognised the Leeds service, appointing Dr Sivan as a consultant to shape COVID-19 rehabilitation response in across 53 countries in Europe region. The Leeds service is at the cutting edge of the evolving story of Long Covid, nationally and internationally. This work has helped shape national guidance and international policy and is highly research-active, learning and sharing how best to treat this difficult condition.