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

COVID-19 is a new virus. Media stories often talk about the numbers of people who die from COVID-19, or about people who are hardly affected and recover quickly. We will conduct a study of the experiences of people who have a range of symptoms that sometime last for months after catching COVID-19. This is called 'Long Covid'. We will use our findings to produce a reliable online resource with practical information and support for people with Long Covid and their families and carers, and information that can be used to train doctors, nurses, social care and other healthcare workers. In our detailed interviews with people with Long Covid, we will ask them about their symptoms, the services they used, the information, support and care needs they have, and how Long Covid has affected their lives. Our findings, with video, audio and written clips from the interviews, will be freely available on a website (www.healthtalk.org/), which has won many prizes for being a source of patient experiences of health and illness that people can trust. We will also be able to compare the experiences of people in our studies with people who live in other countries, and with other studies.