Rehabilitation services for people who have experienced COVID-19

Welcome to our survey on rehabilitation needs following COVID-19

NHS England London recognises that patients across London recovering from COVID-19 need rehabilitation* services. These services should be holistic and take in to account that each patient is a person with individual rehabilitation needs that span across health and social care. Finally, people across London should all equally be able to access the same services. UCLPartners is helping to coordinate this work to support the NHS with the planning and delivery of rehabilitation services.

(Note: We are using the term ‘patient’ to describe a person who had COVID-19, regardless of whether that person was treated in hospital, by the GP, or received no treatment at all. We use the term ‘carer’ to refer to individuals in a patient’s life who helped them when they had COVID-19, and/or are continuing to care for them. For example, this could include partners or family members.)

There are a few phases to this work. In this first stage, we need to define what patients, carers, and healthcare professionals consider to be the most basic, core components of rehabilitation services post-COVID-19, that should become standard for all patients. We need a range of views to best understand the whole picture of what it’s like to recover from COVID-19, and what services should be put in place to help rehabilitation.

For our role in coordinating this work, UCLPartners has reviewed national documents that make recommendations on rehabilitation services. We then narrowed down all the recommendations to a single list of consensus statements that we believe would be necessary for a COVID-19 rehabilitation service.

We are now asking patients and carers what they think about these statements, through this survey. This way we can include the voices and opinions of patients who have actually experienced COVID-19, and their carers who may have a different perspective, or be able to remember other things, and therefore have valuable opinions too.

The feedback from this survey will be presented to the London Clinical Advisory Group, established specifically to support COVID-19 work programmes in London.

*Rehabilitation is a treatment or treatments aimed to facilitate the process of recovery from injury, illness, or disease to as normal a condition as possible, enabling someone to maximise their potential to live a full and active life within their family, social networks, education/training and the workplace where appropriate.

Question Title

* 1. Please describe your experience with COVID-19 (tick all that apply)

I had COVID-19 and was in Intensive Care

I had COVID-19 and was admitted to a ward in a hospital

I had COVID-19, went to A&E, but was never admitted to hospital

I had COVID-19 and received care in the community from my GP

I had COVID-19 and did not receive any care, I self-isolated at home

I have cared for someone who had COVID-19

Other (please specify)

Question Title

Diagram on the programme of work

We are at the first stage, in the red circle

Process to define standards for rehabilitation services - three steps

1) We have identified 13 documents published by national bodies or professional societies that make recommendations for rehabilitation services

2) We reviewed these documents to find recommendations which were considered essential, and used to produce this draft set of standards for COVID-19 rehabilitation services in London

3) Now we are checking these standards with people who have experienced COVID-19, carers, and those healthcare professionals involved in their rehabilitation.

The recommendations

Seventy-eight (78) recommendations have been identified for rehabilitation services in and outside of hospital. The recommendations can be organised in to several categories including:

1) Assessment of needs and coordination of care

2) Infection prevention and control

3) Involvement of people who have experienced COVID-19

4) General recommendations to commissioners and providers of rehabilitation services

The following sections will ask you about these categories of recommendations, with several statements that provide more detail. We want to know what you think about them.