Long Covid: Amplifying the voices of people with lived experience to improve understanding, support, treatment and education. Share-to-improve: Long Covid experience (COv-VOICES) Study

This is a qualitative video- and audio- interview study with ~45 people. We are undertaking in depth interviews with people have experience of the longer-term effects of COVID-19, exploring the effect Long COVID-19 has had and continues to have on their lives, including their: symptoms; access to and experience of services; information, support and care needs. The purpose of undertaking these interviews is to improve understanding of the varied experience of COVID-19, inform further research and service improvement and create a highly accessible resource for patients, families and health care professionals, which will be of immediate use for support and training. We will use our analysis of the interviews to create a freely available online resource for other people with long COVID-19, families and clinicians, to enable them to gain greater insight into these experiences. This will be available on the Healthtalk platform (https://www.healthtalk.org/), a multiple award winning source of patient experience. The members of the team (which includes Professor Louise Locock at the Health Services Research Unit in Aberdeen and Professor Sue Ziebland at the University of Oxford) have extensive experience of using the rigorous social scientific methods underlying Healthtalk in relation to many other health conditions and a track record in co-working and publishing together. They are familiar with Healthtalk’s particular potential for making the experiences of those with less researched and or rarer health conditions accessible to a wide audience.