Dr. John Lambert:

I submitted a proposal last summer about focusing on neurology and neuro-rehabilitation specialists. Those are the people with the most experience in brain injuries, which are the residual problems that most of these patients have. Under the current plan, neurology is almost a tertiary-level problem while the first-level problems are pulmonary and cardiac, which are short term. I only have a dozen people out of a thousand with heart and lung problems, yet a great deal of research has been done on those. We must move the resources around. My ideal programme would entail a neuro-rehabilitation specialist and a neurologist working in a multidisciplinary clinic with pulmonary doctors and infectious disease doctors and, given that it is a significant problem, a range of psychologists to provide support. Psychology is under-resourced under the current plan.

If 30,000 people have long Covid, not all of them can come to these centres. We need to set up a network of GPs with a special interest in long Covid who can be trained and given a partnership with centres to be able to manage patients locally. Currently, patients are going to GPs and GPs are doing their best, but patients are just being put on heart medicines, brain medicines, migraine medicines, psychiatric medicines, pain medicines or nerve medicines. I am seeing them coming to my clinic. We need to give GPs guidance.

My ideal model would be a central neuro-rehabilitation clinic that supports the more complicated patients and is able to treat them based on what we know about brain injury. We would also develop a network of GPs who can manage patients locally and call a friend or refer patients to the clinic when necessary.