Dr. John Lambert:

My only involvement is that I get requests for disability letters, to extend the term of disability or to send letters to occupational health doctors. As I said, 20 staff members from Temple Street were referred by occupational health a number of months ago because they did not know what else to do. They were seeing them but they were not getting better. My understanding is that the UK decided to provide people with disabilities with support if they had occupationally acquired long Covid. I heard recently that the benefits for long Covid patients would be taken away in Ireland. I do not know if that is true or not. I do not get involved in that.

It is like asking how long a piece of string is. How long will long Covid go on? None of us really knows. Some patients are not recovering. It is a real medical condition. I get asked to fill out forms from patients who are not healthcare workers, from some of the insurance companies asking to justify them continuing to be off on sick leave. It would be a good idea for us in Ireland to identify certain criteria for long Covid - because it overlaps with other conditions - to be identified as a condition worthy of patients getting benefits until they recover if they ever recover which is the challenge. Most people do. I do not want to be disheartening to people by suggesting they will not recover. It is almost two and a half years since March 2020 and I am still seeing people who have not recovered. Not everybody has responded to the treatments I have given. It is a moving target to know how long long Covid will continue.

We need to support the patients because the patients I see are patients who have never missed a day of work and are not malingerers. They cannot be mindful and get themselves better. They cannot do grade exercises and get themselves better because they crash. It does not work. This is a different disease from any we have seen before. It has similarities to other chronic conditions we have seen previously. It is a new disease and we are continuing to learn. We need to support the patients in whatever way we can by providing medical services and providing assurances that their livelihoods will not be taken away as a result of contracting life Covid.