South East London Long COVID Programme

The South East London Long COVID Programme is a two-year project funded by NHS Charities Together and Guy’s & St Thomas’ Charity.

It is one of the first KHP services to include all five NHS Trusts in south east London, their hospital charities, and other partner organisations such as London South Bank University. Its overall aim is to accelerate the recovery of people with Long COVID across the six boroughs of south east London.

The programme highlighted a need to find those that were experiencing symptoms but were not accessing hospital services. Working with Lambeth Together via the Lambeth Health & Wellbeing bus the team found that 21% of visitors to the bus had never heard of Long COVID. The programme is investigating how to raise awareness of Long COVID symptoms in local communities and improve equitable access to specialist services while delivering simple messages about how to help people recover from post viral illnesses and prevent Long COVID.

To connect with the community the team talked to and provided a bespoke education programme to local Health Ambassadors - see the video below - via Healthwatch Southwark so they could raise awareness about Long COVID in the community setting and signpost people to useful resources.

(58) South East London Long COVID Programme - health ambassadors workshop - YouTube

As a result of this training there was an increase in 54% of conversations about Long COVID at a local level. The team is planning to deliver the educational programme to Health Ambassadors and Health Champions across south east London over the next few months, so watch this space! For more information on the South East London Long COVID Programme please contact Julie.moore@gstt.nhs.uk.

Jacky Jones, Therapies Director of the South East London Long COVID service, said:

This grant funded work has provided the platform for greater understanding of the numbers and types of patients we need to help.  Using local workshops and data from the local GPs we can work towards our goal of preventing Long COVID.

Julie Moore, Senior Physiotherapy Lead for the programme, said:

The engagement from a diverse group of local people was remarkable but we still have huge amounts of work to do to support the people in South East London with Long COVID.  However, we have a great team and we are using feedback from our workshops to drive significant change.