Matt Shanahan urges long COVID recognition for health workers

First, I would like to thank my colleague Deputy Dennis Naughton and Coyte Nialla who have done a huge amount of work in relation to this area and without doubt, Minister, Long Covid is here to stay, it looks like, and it is an absolute medical syndrome and there is no doubt beyond that now and as I say, it is very hard to see where the treatment regimes are going but we have to build a comprehensive service now in place to try and look after people who are living in the world. who have been infected and just as importantly we have to try and look at mitigating people contracting COVID and the effects of Long Covid and I suppose we have had a lot of anecdotal information in terms of the healthcare space and the educational sector which have both been heavily impacted and at the start of COVID we know full well that we had people working in very compromised environments and in actual fact it took us many, many months to recognise that COVID was an airborne disease despite the fact that all the evidence was the fact that all the evidence was there from the start and I would, Deputy Murphy has asked for a review, I think we still need to go back and look at some of the actions that we took around COVID at the very early stage, we missed an awful lot of tricks, we were very late to bring in mitigating therapies, we didn't bring in antigen testing which could have significantly helped to reduce the amount of COVID infection for nearly 18 months into the disease minister and these points were never handled. But we basically now have a cohort of people in the country who were affected by long COVID and we don't exactly know the numbers but it could be anywhere between 3 and 5% of those who contract COVID and that appears to be a figure that's going to keep recurring as people, you can get COVID and recover, you can get COVID subsequently and develop long COVID as a result. So we need to have a look at this syndrome and I would like to applaud the work of Professor Lambert and what he is doing and I would say Minister he gave a briefing in the AV room here some weeks ago and what was stood out very prominently was the lack of support that he is getting, significant support from the department in terms of trying to push the initiatives that he has highlighted and I think that's very disappointing from the government's position. I think it's fair to say that long COVID now is largely, it seems centred around neurological syndromes and immune responses and in that case it falls into the whole areas of MEE fibromyalgia and other areas that we have people in the country who suffer and we haven't done enough for these patient cohorts either. But I can think of a couple of patients of long COVID and I would point out one health worker in Waterford, 52 years of age, a marathon runner prior to contracting COVID who contracted COVID as a result of her work in the hospital and subsequently was off work for nearly five months, tried to go back to work, could barely climb the stairs and she has now taken early retirement. It's really, really unfortunate that this has happened to her by dint of doing her job and to that point Minister it seems to me as part of our motion we are asking government to recognise long COVID as an occupational illness and requiring a comprehensive special leave with pay scheme for frontline healthcare workers as well as the expansion of services for other similar illnesses such as ME and chronic fatigue syndrome. And you know, this has already been recognised by the EU but I know it's up to each member state to ratify but I would ask Minister please that you go and talk to colleagues at this stage. I think this is a small cohort of patients ultimately and they need to be given supports from the state and they need to know that if they have long term illness that they can claim long term disability for COVID syndrome. And as you say, it is difficult to diagnose but it's based on symptoms rather than you can't do a blood test for long COVID but you can certainly see the symptoms that are resulting from it. So I think government needs to develop a far greater strategic action plan Minister. And I know we have a number of COVID clinics in development around the country and you've highlighted in your own statement there that right they're not fully staffed we're trying to get there. But I think we do need to understand that every hospital in the country is going to have to have some expertise in this area because you're going to have varying degrees of symptoms. Some people are going to require very significant interaction with consultants, some less so but there is a good bit of work going on and I would like to point out to you Minister just one thing which is in relation to vitamin D. And we had anecdotal research going on out in Connolly Hospital for the past two years. It was actually brought into the Health Committee here over a year ago showing the potential mitigating benefits of people supplementing vitamin D. Quite a lot of work has been done and very, very significant statistical research has shown that having high levels of vitamin D gives you a great amount of protection to the worst symptoms of COVID-19. That research was brought into the Health Committee, a report was generated. We could have gone and done a public health piece around supplementation of vitamin D. We could have given people access to vitamin D through financial supports to try and help and we've done neither. And I think that's a great shame, Minister. So look, I want to join with my colleagues in supporting this motion. I think we need to recognise the occupational injury that has been caused, Minister. And we need to do more to support patients and most especially the caregivers who are trying to develop the multidisciplinary teams to deliver this. We'll all get right on that one of the districts so we Terry. I can take it in and do more double alarms. We'll try five or less then the medical issues. The complex forms can't compete with any educator though or other outcomes. We're more recent changes to win theijms. So you can get a kannst sum of athletes. Our staff still don't work.