Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to support research into long covid.

The Department, through the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), launched a £20 million joint research call which closed on 9 December 2020. This call will fund comprehensive research to understand and address the longer term physical and mental health effects of COVID-19 in individuals who contracted the virus but were not hospitalised. Results of the call will be published in due course.

The NIHR and UKRI have already invested £8.5 million in the PHOSP-COVID study led by the University of Leicester. The study is one of the world’s largest comprehensive research studies into the long-term physical and mental health impacts of COVID-19 on hospitalised patients and will draw on expertise from a consortium of leading researchers and doctors from across the United Kingdom.