Healthcare staff battle Long Covid
Hospital sets up free clinics to help its staff cope
Staff at Taranaki Hospital have set up their own clinic to help colleagues suffering from Long Covid. It has no formal funding and relies on physios, occupational therapists and occupational health nurses have been given time while on shift to care for staff with the disease.
Rebecca, a nurse at Taranaki Hospital, said Long Covid made her so forgetful she thought she had earlyonset Alzheimers. She would get in the car and forget where she was going, or leave appliances on for hours.
“I’d cook dinner and just forget to turn the oven off. My husband would come home and say, ‘Did you know that oven’s been going for 24 hours?’ Or I’d be boiling potatoes, take them off and just leave the gas hobs going.”
Long Covid made Rebecca — a normally healthy person — exhausted by a persistent cough and uncontrollably emotional.
“I was walking around nearly incontinent at times. I’d beaten up my pelvic floor muscles with all the coughing. Then the coughing makes you tired and fatigued, then you’re so tired, you’re emotional. I’ve never been so tearful in my life.”
As a staff member, Rebecca was referred to Taranaki Hospital’s free Long Covid clinic. It was not until she started receiving care that her symptoms improved and she could return to work full time.
“People go, ‘Pffft, Long Covid. I did Covid it was easy, it was no problem. It’s harder having a cold’. So when people would say that I was like, ‘Oh my god, what’s wrong with me? Why am I struggling so much?’ It was actually quite nice having someone come along and say, ‘Yes, what you have is genuine’.”
Fy Dunford, a cardio respiratory physio, saw a need for healthcare workers to receive Long Covid support early on in the pandemic.
“We were doing so in cafes, dining halls, in the corridor, or halfway up a stairwell. We would catch someone struggling and start to have that conversation.”
This led her team to set up the Long Covid clinic in Taranaki in June 2022.
Dunford said the team of hospital physios, occupational therapists, speech therapists, social workers and dietitians had helped more than 20 staff members.
“Healthcare workers have a relatively high level of exposure to Covid19. It makes good sense to help the staff who help and care for others.”
Mel, another Taranaki Hospital worker, met the Long Covid team when the disease had her feeling desperate and depressed.
“I can remember being told that when you’ve got children, you’re going to be the tiredest you’ve ever been in your life — and that was true up until I got this.”
Mel said the clinic helped her chart the times she was working hard, resting and crashing. This, together with breathing exercises, helped her get back to work. “On a colouring-in chart, I could see visually the improvement before I felt it.”
Dunford said with no government funding, the clinic cannot be expanded to the public.
“It’s difficult because [specialists] don’t have extra funding or resource, so we’re having to fit those [GP] referrals into our current and existing caseloads. But for a lot of [specialists] there are already considerable waitlists.”
Te Whatu Ora has not been able to answer why it has not funded a national co-ordinated response to Long Covid. It told RNZ GPs had clinical guidelines to help patients manage the disease and were well placed to refer them to specialists.
Dunford said people with Long Covid had been left to fend for themselves. “These are members of our workforce, carers of children, and people that are going to have a high impact on ongoing spend in the future, so we have to be attentive to this health need.”
Long Covid experts continued to call for more help for patients in the absence of publicly-funded Long Covid clinics.