LISTEN

Long COVID personalised self-management support co-design and evaluation.

Background

Individuals with long COVID experience a wide variety of ongoing problems such as tiredness and difficulty with everyday tasks and means they can struggle to return to their former lives. This is then made worse by uncertainty and a lack of understanding by some healthcare professionals.

Study design

The LISTEN project aims to work in partnership with individuals living with long COVID to design and evaluate a package of self-management support personalised to their needs. This project will take 24 months. In the first six months we will recruit people living with or recovered from long COVID, and rehabilitation practitioners to a ‘LISTEN Co-design’ group, helped by ‘Diversity and Ability’ who have expertise in reaching seldom heard populations. We will use different activities such as online groups to design our intervention to include a book, digital resources and a new training package for rehabilitation practitioners to enable them to deliver the intervention.

Recruitment

We will recruit individuals with long COVID and randomly allocate to an intervention or control group. The control group will receive NHS information already available; the intervention group will receive the new resources and up to six coaching sessions from the trained rehabilitation practitioners. We will test the effect of the intervention on how they feel and cope with everyday activities. We will record expenses and loss of work to understand the impact of long COVID and our intervention on society and individuals. We will explore ways in which the intervention can be used across communities.

Patient and public involvement

Individuals living with long COVID and a large patient and public involvement (PPI) panel from diverse backgrounds have helped shape the LISTEN project. With our co-design group and inclusion advisor we will recruit a PPI panel co-chaired by our PPI co-applicant. We will share our findings through accessible communications designed with our PPI group, academic publications and conferences.

This project is in partnership with the Bridges Self-Management social enterprise.