COVID-19 Update: 11th January 2021
Guidance for healthcare professionals on return to work for people with long-COVID
The Faculty is pleased to publish this timely guidance, developed under the leadership of our new Academic Dean, Dr Ira Madan, who introduces it below:
On behalf of the FOM, a multidisciplinary group developed guidance aimed at all healthcare professionals to assist them in facilitating the return to work of people who are unable to work due to long-COVID. We have developed the guidance alongside the NICE/RCGP/SIGN COVID-19 rapid guideline: managing the long-term effects of COVID-19, published on 18th December 2020.
The FOM guidance is intended to complement and supplement the NICE guideline. We have deliberately not duplicated guidance on the management of the long-term effects of COVID-19 but have focussed on functional impairment which may lead to obstacles to RTW. Importantly, where we were unable to find evidence for our guidance in the peer-reviewed literature, we based our advice on general occupational health principles.
The peer-reviewed published literature on long-COVID is rapidly increasing; our guidance is a living document and will be reviewed on 31st March 2021. The full-sized file is best to use if you wish to print the guidance and the smaller file is designed for quickly sharing the document digitally.
We hope that FOM’s guidance will prove useful not only to our own membership but for all health professionals as part of good healthcare practice and we encourage members to disseminate it widely.
Dr Anne de Bono
President
Dr Ira Madan
Academic Dean
