Optimising General Practice Long COVID Care - an Educational Intervention.

Summary

This trial will evaluate the feasibility of a pilot educational intervention for GPs that aims to enhance care and care outcomes among patients with long COVID at six general practices in the Ireland East region.

Our first objective is to conduct focus groups with key stakeholders (GPs, other health professionals, patients, families/carers) that will inform the contents of an education intervention. The second objective will be to implement this educational intervention, and the third objective will be to determine whether the intervention is feasible.

Study outcomes will include:

* Qualitative findings from co-design focus groups and post-intervention semi-structured interviews with GPs.
* Practice and patient study recruitment and retention data.
* GP / Practice characteristics: age \& gender, practice location, general and COVID-19 patient population figures.
* Patient characteristics: Patient age, gender, COVID-19 vaccination status, and medical history details.
* Patient scores on a self-report measure assessing the symptoms, symptom severity, functional impact, and overall health (COVID-19 Yorkshire Rehabilitation Scale (C-19-YRS)).

Conditions

• Long COVID

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Intervention Group

Intervention group activity involves three components: 1. Intervention group GPs will be provided with a long COVID 'toolkit'. The toolkit will be prepared by the study team in collaboration with expert clinicians and public and patient representatives as a resource for GPs to use in patient care. 2. GPs will attend an expert clinician / patient led long COVID educational session grounded in the findings of the toolkit. 3. Applying learnings to date, each GP will conduct case reviews of eight patients with long COVID attending their practice and provide patient care as appropriate.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• HRB Primary Care Clinical Trials Network Ireland

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• Mater Misericordiae University Hospital

  collaborator OTHER

• Clinical Research Centre, School of Medicine, University College Dublin

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• School of Medicine, University College Dublin

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• School of Economics, University College Dublin

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• Irish College of General Practitioners

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• St Vincent's University Hospital

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• Health Services Executive, Ireland

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• South East Technological University, Ireland

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• National Rehabilitation Hospital, Dublin, Ireland

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• University College Dublin

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Walter Cullen, MD · UCD NUI: University College Dublin

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

HEALTH_SERVICES_RESEARCH

Masking

NONE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2025-03-31

Primary Completion

2025-04-30

Completion

2025-04-30