Calls for action from the BMA include the following:
- Financial support for doctors and health care staff with long COVID.
- The recognition of long COVID as an occupational disease among health care workers, along with a definition of the condition that covers all of the debilitating disease’s symptoms.
- Improved access to physical and mental health services to help comprehensive assessment, investigations, and treatment.
- Greater workplace protection for health care staff who risk their lives for others.
- Better support for long COVID sufferers to return to work safely if they can, including a flexible approach to the use of workplace adjustments.
“One would think, given the circumstances under which we fell ill and current workforce shortages, NHS employers would be eager to do everything to facilitate the return to work of people with long COVID,” said Dr. Fearnley. “However, NHS employers are legally required to implement only ‘reasonable adjustments,’ and so things such as extended phased return or adjustments to shift patterns are not always being facilitated. Instead, an increasing number of employers are choosing to terminate contracts.”
Raymond Agius, the BMA’s occupational medicine committee cochair, also put the blame on inadequate safety measures for doctors. Those inadequate measures persist to this day, inasmuch as U.K. hospitals have dropped masking requirements.
“During the COVID-19 pandemic, doctors were left exposed and unprotected at work,” he said in a BMA press release. “They often did not have access to the right PPE. ... Too many risk assessments of workplaces and especially of vulnerable doctors were not undertaken.”
A small minority of doctors who were surveyed said they had access to respiratory protective equipment about the time they contracted COVID-19. Only 11% had access to an FFP2 respirator (the equivalent of an N95 mask); 16% had an FFP3 respirator (the equivalent of an N99 mask).
To date, the British government hasn’t issued much of a response to the survey, saying only that it has invested more than ₤50 million to better understand long COVID.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.