Experiences of accessing healthcare support from the perspectives of people living with Long Covid and healthcare professionals: 2022 Baz et al

Full title: ‘I don't know what to do or where to go’. Experiences of accessing healthcare support from the perspectives of people living with Long Covid and healthcare professionals: A qualitative study in Bradford, UK

Abstract

Background
In October 2022, it was estimated 2.3 million people in the United Kingdom have self-reported Long Covid (LC). Many people have reported not receiving adequate healthcare support. There is a lack of research which provides an in-depth exploration of the barriers faced by people with LC in accessing healthcare support. It is important to understand these barriers to provide better support, care and advice for those experiencing LC.

Objective
To understand the barriers faced in accessing primary, secondary and specialist healthcare support for people with LC.

Design and Participation
40 interviews were conducted with people living with LC in Bradford alongside 12 interviews with healthcare professionals (HCPs) providing LC support in Bradford healthcare settings. Interviews were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis.

Results
People living with LC had a large degree of difficulty in accessing healthcare services for LC support. We categorized the healthcare access experiences of participants into five main types: (1) being unable to access primary care, (2) accessing primary care but receiving (perceived) inadequate support, (3) extreme persistence, (4) alternatives to mainstream health care and (5) positive experiences. There was a severe lack of access to specialist LC services. Ethnic minority participants faced a further barrier of mistrust and fear of services deterring them from accessing support. HCPs discussed systemic barriers to delivering services. Experiences were embedded in macrostructural issues further exacerbated by the pandemic.

Conclusion
To better support people with LC, the barriers faced in accessing healthcare support must be addressed. Of significance, improvements to general practitioner access are required; especially as GPs are the first line of support for people living with LC.

Open access, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hex.13687

 

Barriers to accessing services: lack of such services.

Somehow they can't say it because they're to blame. The lack of self-blame in medicine is a blocker. As in in quality control, there is a grade of issues from trivial to blocking, where blockers are issues that prevent normal function of the system/gadget/tool/service. The inability of the people responsible for failing to even notice they are failing is why there is so much failure in the first place. Medicine places itself on a completely undeserved pedestal.

GPs are not the first line of support for chronic illness. They do not support, they're usually not even authorized to. They're the first physicians most patients will see, sure, that's a very different thing from being the first line of support.

Those experiences were identical before the pandemic, the only difference is there's far more people and social media has put a magnifying lens on this disaster of choice. Another self-blame that is glossed over because the responsibility is with the supply, while they intend to blame the patients.

Textbook "we've investigated ourselves and found no evidence of wrongdoing or blame of any kind so we'll blame the people we're failing instead, as is tradition". This is a very long tradition. Anyone who bothers can easily see and understand this, but they can't see us as real people, never even counted us, never accepted the issues above even though they were placed deliberately and aggressively defended as infallible.