The Post Hospitalisation Covid-19 study (PHOSP-COVID) is a national consortium led by experts in Leicester, working together to undertake research to better understand the symptoms and organ damage in people that were hospitalised with the COVID-19 infection and those now experiencing long-COVID.
PHOSP-COVID combines expertise from doctors, nurses, allied health professionals, sociologists, scientists, statisticians, and data scientists across 24 universities and 83 hospitals together with 13 charities and public patient groups.
Since the immediate emergency posed by the pandemic in 2020, the PHOSP-COVID team have recruited more than 7,000 participants from 83 hospitals, obtaining 16 million data points and collecting more than 100,000 samples.
The resulting research, of which many papers have been published in the last 12 months, has highlighted large ongoing health impairments and provided insight into the possible biological mechanisms underpinning long-COVID, informing further research into potential treatments and patient care.
Two clinical trials of treatments for long-COVID are now underway. The first, PHOSP-R is a rehabilitation trial, which was completed in Spring 2024 and findings submitted for publication. In the second trial which commenced in April 2024, inflammatory long-COVID participants are taking part in a phase IIa double blind, randomised placebo-controlled trial of Tocilizumab to investigate the effect on health-related quality of life in adults with Long COVID and persistent inflammation (PHOSP-I) trial. Working groups across all areas of physiology, including mental health and rehabilitation, with input from patient and charity groups has enabled a multimodal and holistic study of what continues to be a significant health burden on the population into 2024.