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Long-COVID: QNI publishes resource for community nurses

Queen's Nursing Institute resource helps nurses tackle COVID-related heath inequalities and ensure patients and colleagues with long-COVID receive holistic care

Queen's Nursing Institute resource helps nurses tackle COVID-related heath inequalities and ensure patients and colleagues with long-COVID receive holistic care

Queen's Nursing Institute resource helps nurses tackle COVID-related heath inequalities and ensure patients and colleagues with long-COVID receive holistic care
Picture: iStock

Community and district nurses treating patients with long-COVID will have access to a new resource in a bid to help people get holistic care.

Long-COVID exposes ‘stark health inequalities’

The resource, published by the Queen’s Nursing Institute (QNI), outlines considerations for nurses while signposting to appropriate mental and physical health, self-care, education and spiritual care resources available for people with the condition.

The QNI hopes it will address the ‘stark health inequalities’ in the UK population, which are clearer than ever among COVID patients.

‘While much work has been done to investigate and analyse the health disparities that COVID and post-COVID syndrome has caused, much still remains to be done,’ said the QNI’s nursing programmes manager for leadership Eve Thrupp.

‘The evidence that COVID-19 has had a disproportionate impact on black, indigenous, and Latinx communities serves as a stark reminder that further work and exploration is needed to investigate the serious health inequalities within health systems.’

The QNI resource, Living with Long-COVID – A Community and Primary Care Nursing Resource, seeks to empower nurses to lead patients to improved care and treatment for their condition, and help them live as independently as possible.

Advice for assessing nurses living with long-COVID

It also gives advice for community nurses assessing registered nurses who are living with long-COVID, including a plan for gradually returning to work, whether a different role at work is needed, and consideration of shift patterns.

The advice comes as 2021 figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) suggested that approximately 122,000 healthcare workers and 31,000 social care workers have self-reported symptoms of long-COVID.

A QNI spokesperson added: ‘Community nurses are highly skilled at assessing complexity of need in the home and other community healthcare settings.

‘It is also important to recognise that registered nurses need to collaborate with numerous other professionals, carers and volunteers to support people living with long-COVID. Therefore, the resource signposts to many other professional sites to amplify nurses’ knowledge base.’


Find out more

QNI (2022) Living with Long-COVID – A Community and Primary Care Nursing Resource


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