Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what plans he has for the involvement of (a) medical research charities and (b) the NHS in researching long-covid.

The Department, through the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), recently launched a joint research call which closed on 9 December 2020. Through this call, £18.5 million has been committed to funding four research studies to understand and address the longer term physical and mental health effects of ‘long’ COVID-19, in individuals who contracted the virus but were not hospitalised.

The NIHR and UKRI have also invested £8.5 million in the PHOSP-COVID study which is one of the world’s largest comprehensive research studies into the long-term health impacts of COVID-19 on hospitalised patients. Researchers and clinicians as part of the study are actively working with medical charities to help define key questions for research.