Long Covid

Baroness Neuberger Excerpts

Thursday 17th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neuberger (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as chair of University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, chair of Whittington Health NHS Trust and a member of the North Central London Integrated Care Board, as well as other interests stated on the register. I am most grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, a wonderful fellow non-executive director at Whittington Health, for securing this debate. I too am very grateful to the Library, which has been hugely helpful, and I am enormously grateful to all other speakers, because most have said most of what I was going to say.

I have a very specific point. At UCLH, we a run a well-known and much-admired long Covid service, which is led by the remarkable Melissa Heightman, who is also a national specialty adviser for NHS England and the co-chief investigator for the STIMULATE-ICP study, the largest long Covid trial to date. We know that the service is desperately needed; we have heard that all around the House. Those who run this particular service are working night and day; it does not have the resources to do what is needed, to the extent that those who run it are begging for bits of resource from elsewhere, mostly for people. So short is the service of staff that they recently asked UCLH Charity to fund an extra consultant for two years, which it has agreed to. I am well aware, as we all are, that today is the day of the Autumn Statement and that times are tough, but it is really serious when an NHS trust with a £1 billion turnover has to ask its charity to support an on-the-ground service led by the national lead, even for a limited period of time—particularly for a service designed to help other NHS staff across London.

Worse still, as other noble Lords have said, some 10% to 14% of reported cases are NHS staff. Although we all know that, it is not generally known among the population—but it is not really surprising, given the higher exposure to the virus that they all had. What a difference getting them well and back to work would make to the cash-strapped NHS and to the challenge over staff numbers. We have real trouble in recruiting and, as others have said, we have people leaving the service.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

Can I personally endorse what the noble Baroness just said, in particular her testimony on Melissa Heightman and the team at UCLH? I had extensive dealings with them as a Minister, and their work is absolutely first class. I am heartbroken to hear that they are having to reach to charity for financial support.

[Baroness Neuberger (CB)]

I am extremely grateful to the noble Lord, and I shall make sure that Melissa knows about that.

Meanwhile, we have all the figures that everybody has cited, and the ONS has reported that long Covid has adversely affected the day-to-day activities of 1.6 million people—that is absolutely huge, and other noble Lords have mentioned that fact. The NHS has tried to help with that ongoing issue but, unfortunately, not enough. I want to go through that, because I think that it is relevant.

In October 2020, NHS England announced a five-point plan to support long Covid patients; it commissioned NICE to develop new guidance and established designated long Covid clinics to provide

“joined up care for physical and mental health”.

It also created the NHS long Covid task force to guide the NHS’s national approach on long Covid, and it funded NIHR research on long Covid better to understand the condition. In July 2021, NHS England published its long Covid plan for 2021-22, which included investing £70 million to expand long Covid services and £30 million in the rollout of an enhanced service for general practice, to support patients in primary care. But when NHS England published its updated plan in July this year, the previously enhanced service funding was not continued, so primary care no longer receives any ring-fenced funding for this condition—yet, as we know, it affects nearly 2 million people.

The problem is both insufficient resources to do all the work that is needed and insufficient forward planning to enable those services that do exist to build up capacity, engage in research, recruit, train, educate, and care for patients, including, importantly, the large number of NHS staff who appear to have been affected. We have a major health problem here that is likely to run for many years. Treatment is uneven across the country and research, which will need a lot of funding, is in its early days. This is an additional burden on an already very stretched NHS, both with patients with long Covid and with the large numbers of staff who have it.

What we really need is a properly NHSE-commissioned service to be put in place now, with secure funding for the next several years, even in these cash-strapped times. It feels like a hand-to-mouth, temporarily funded arrangement, so it is really hard to build a resilient service for the longer term. Can the Minister assure this House that such long-term commissioning will now be put in place, given the recent evidence of the numbers of people away from work with long Covid, the huge proportion of NHS staff affected, making other NHS backlog issues worse, the general impact on the UK economy, which others have mentioned, and of course the sheer suffering that long Covid is causing?