Greater Manchester NHS supported by Aqua, and People’s Voice Media have been developing approaches to supporting people with Long Covid.

To help inform this work, our team have been working with people experiencing Long Covid as part of a series of Community Reporting sessions in which people have shared what it is like to live with the illness. We believe that stories are great ways of learning from one another and can be powerful ways of communicating. The stories people have shared with us has shed light on how Long Covid impacts on people’s lives and what support would help people through it.

So, what did we learn from the stories?

Some of the key insights in the stories were:

• Compassionate care – focussing on how people are listened to, validated, treated in more human ways, showing empathy. In short, clinicians and professionals in the system need to be more human and less ‘process focussed’ 
• It’s not one size fits all – the lists of symptoms are different for different people. People’s experiences are unique. It’s also a changing thing; there are good days and bad days – it’s a bit like snakes and ladders 
• Emotional, psychological support is good when it happens, but inconsistent for some, hard to access, and there are long waiting times. In this respect, peer support is really important. Some people were offered it this and some were not – it felt inconsistent. Also, sometimes peer support has become ‘NHSified’ 
• Support is fragmented – no one is treating or welcoming the whole person, each symptom is treated in isolation.

This short film summarises the key points from across a larger set of stories and concludes with some recommendations for the health and social care sector for supporting people with Long Covid.