Long Covid clinic helping hundreds in Staffordshire regain lives

Trish Denison works in the clinic as an occupational therapist lead. She admits what people want is a magic bullet, a way to feel normal again.

Unfortunately, that is not something medical science has found.

So, the clinic offers something else. The first step, she said, was to get people to work on coping with the effects of long Covid. They manage the symptoms rather than the symptoms managing them.

Patients are taught to try to accept their life has changed, but that is it still possible to carry on living.

It can take a while for patients to find the service. Ms Hughes was lucky in many ways, she says. She worked in a GP surgery and when it became clear she was not recovering from her Covid infection, the GP referred her to the clinic.

Ms Forrester, though, faced a much harder journey getting help. She spent over two years trying to get anyone to believe she had a problem, and felt “fobbed off” by her doctors.

When she finally phoned the service, she was met with a sympathetic ear and someone who believed what she was saying.

She told me she burst into tears.