Practice Pointer: Work and vocational rehabilitation for people living with long covid, 2024, O’Connor, Raynor et al.

Work and vocational rehabilitation for people living with long covid
Rory J O’Connor; Amy Parkin; Ghazala Mir; Jordan Mullard; Sareeta Baley; Jenny Ceolta-Smith; Clare Rayner

What you need to know

• Support patients to assess their current abilities at work compared with what they could do previously; they don’t need to be 100% well to start the process of returning to work

• Going back to work too early after acute illness may be counterproductive; patients should not make hasty decisions around resignation or retirement in the early stages

• Use the fit note to help someone return to work, emphasising the need for flexibility to accommodate day-to-day fluctuations

Link | PDF (BMJ) [Open Access]

 

"Many people living with long covid are attempting to return to work, or stay in work, while learning to manage an emerging long term condition.2 These challenges may be compounded by workplace burnout, fuelled by labour shortages, the psychological effects of the pandemic, widening inequalities, and global economic insecurity."

Hmmm

 

I feel compelled every once in a while to restate obvious things that I’d become sick of repeating, to dust them off for another outing. So here goes…

WTF.
WTF.
WTF!?

A government doesn’t have to ensure that each member of the population catches COVID-19 once a month and eventually ends up with brain damage and heart failure or at least a small stroke or a few blood clots.

Nor to force these now sickly members of society to go back to work anyway. A government could just not do that.

Could try to keep people healthy instead, if only so that they are healthy enough to keep working and help out this ‘economy’ fellow I’ve been hearing so much about.

 

It’s fine. These people have an unknown novel condition, which means they’re the experts. If they go back too early, it’s on them.

do I need to indicate sarcasm?

 

Those sure are real problems. They just have nothing to do with this problem. Except labour shortages, which are in large part this problem, but they don't see it. It's actually kind of funny that they mix in unrelated problems with the clear wink-and-nod that they are similar (LC is basically burnout, wink, wink), but also include a consequence of the main problem being discussed, unaware that it's a consequence of it.

This was written with pwLC and it shows, but it adds up to a sort of compromise between the patients who get it, and the health care professionals who add, well, nothing. Other than the usual weird stuff that hints at psychological problems.

It's also largely ignorant of the reality of work. Not everyone can ask for accommodations from an employer. I was self-employed when I got ill, so all the clinic could do was sign me a work note, which I was, what, supposed to hand to myself? This basically takes an average of averages and simply ignores that there are common exceptions. There is discussion of this, but it really assumes that government schemes work, and of course it's fully UK-centric and simply fails in most of the world, which doesn't have any protections for disability at all.

As they recognize, most of the advice comes from the patient community. Professionals have really not added anything to it. This should not be acceptable.

In collaborations between patients with lived experience and HCPs, you usually find that the only useful contributions come from the patients. Here again.

Or maybe it's just the nature and perspective of how they're trained that makes a solid understanding come off otherwise, it wouldn't be the first time. So a problem with how the profession uses language that removes meaning and understanding.