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Stevens announces £10m for ‘long covid’ clinics


NHS England will spend £10m on new clinics for ‘long covid’ sufferers, it was announced yesterday.

Sir Simon Stevens, NHSE chief executive, told the NHS Providers annual conference the clinics would offer support to the “probably hundreds of thousands” of people suffering persisting symptoms such as fatigue, breathlessness and ‘brain fog’ months after being infected with COVID-19.

It comes amid growing calls for wider services to support people with ‘long covid,’ as hospital follow-up clinics are generally only open to those who were previously admitted with the virus.

HSJ was last month only able to identify one genuine “long covid clinic”, despite claims by health secretary Matt Hancock they had “announced them in July”. It appears that comment was a mistake.

Speaking about long covid, he said: “The NHS has got to be just as responsive and agile in respect of… new needs, including long covid, as we were in repurposing critical care, and ventilators, and acute capacity in the first phase in March, April and May."

“Today we are going to be allocating £10m to establish a network of designated long covid clinics across the country, which, in line with new NICE guidelines on effective treatment pathways, will offer support for the tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, of patients who have got long covid.”

Sir Simon also told the conference today that NHSE was “enthusiastic” about introducing regular asymptomatic covid testing for NHS staff “if and when” it is recommended by the government chief medical officer, and when Test and Trace has enough capacity. 

There are growing calls for regular testing of asymptomatic NHS staff, especially in hotspot areas, including from former health secretary Jeremy Hunt.

Sir Simon said it was “something the chief medical officer and the test and trace programme are continuing to review”.

He said: “We would be enthusiastic about doing that if and when that is the clinical recommendation and if and when the Test and Trace programme has got the testing capacity to do that. The plan was always that it would largely have to be sourced out of the total testing capacity available to the nation, not just the NHS labs.”

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Source: HSJ, 7 October 2020

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