NHS needs urgent investment to cope with the looming long Covid tsunami

Health correspondent Shaun Lintern on the challenge of long covid for community health services

Long Covid risks overwhelming NHS services (Getty)

It is almost a year since Britain entered lockdown and for the last 12 months the focus has been on saving lives, protecting hospitals from being overrun and keeping the vulnerable safe. But as we emerge blinking into the sun from the darkness of the last year, there is another pressing challenge now coming into sharp focus.

Today’s report by the National Institute for Health Research on the latest evidence for long Covid paints a worrying picture of a debilitating suite of conditions that have a severe impact on sufferers.

Estimates still remain unclear on just how prevalent the problem is but they range from 300,000 reported by the Office for National Statistics to up to more than one million sufferers in the wake of January’s surge in cases.

The NIHR report makes clear this is not just a case of feeling a bit under the weather for a few weeks – for the worst affected it can be an active illness that damages their organs – even their brain – and leaves them unable to work, look after children or have a normal life.

But as we have come to learn with Covid-19, nothing is ever easy or simple. Long Covid is not the same in everyone. There are different symptoms and effects in at least four distinct groupings.

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The needs of these patients will be different. Some will need minor support, psychological therapy and time. Others will need ongoing healthcare, blood tests, MRI scans and rehabilitation and medication. Others will need a mixture of the two.

As the NIHR study author Dr Elaine Maxwell told The Independent, this new problem could become a significant burden on society.

So far the NHS has invested millions in new assessment clinics and the government has funded £20million in new research.

But as always in the NHS the service patients need will rest on the availability of the workforce of doctors, nurses and specialists to deliver it. There are already backlogs in long covid assessment and testing.

We know from the scale of hospital admissions to critical care that we will see in excess of 100,000 patients needing intensive rehabilitation in the community.

The Independent has repeatedly highlighted the crisis in community nursing over the past year, where half of all district nurses have been lost since 2010. The staff that remain are working longer and it is inevitable some patients may have to go without care.

Unlike the surge in hospital Covid cases that rose and fell sharply over a few months, the tsunami of long Covid risks drowning NHS rehabilitation, community and primary care services which have no capacity to cope.

Urgent investment is needed to build the service these patients deserve. With Covid likely to become an endemic infection that will never be eradicated, this threat cannot be overlooked.