43 - AAPM&R’s Long-COVID Learning Collaborative: Education During a Newly Emerging Crisis

Introduction

Long COVID¹ emerged in the Spring of 2020. Physiatrists were well positioned to be leaders in treating these patients. The AAPM&R needed to educate these clinicians; However, literature on this emerging syndrome was nonexistent at the time.

The Long-COVID Collaborative was formed to:

1. Serve as an open education platform with lectures, case reports, discussions, etc. via monthly meetings.
   


2. Draft Assessment and Treatment Guidelines.²
   


3. Present Guidelines and other findings at National Meetings.

Methods

Building the collaborative involved contacting ~100 academic institutions and inviting clinicians to join calls to discuss their clinic setup and their assessment and treatment processes. All specialty types were welcome (pulmonologist, cardiologist, neurologists, etc.).

The urgency of topics was gauged via surveys, and writing groups were formed to cover Fatigue³, Breathing⁴, Cognitive⁵, and Cardiovascular⁶ issues and more⁷. A Heath Equity Task Force was formed to provide an “Equity Statement”, addressing how historically marginalized populations need special attention.

Results

The Collaborative developed eight published Guidance Statements⁷, five in-person presentations for National Meetings, and provided hundreds of clinicians the opportunity to learn on our calls.

Discussion

The Learning Collaborative was our best opportunity to provide timely education to clinicians during this emerging crisis. Waiting for peer reviewed literature was not viable, so we used the process of creating the needed literature as a method of educating our learners.

Conclusion

The Learning Collaborative was a success in terms of our content output, and it strengthened AAPM&R’s relationships with other medical societies. It also garnering us national media attention. We have applied this model to general physiatry topics; our first non-long COVID guidance was accepted for publication: AAPM&R Consensus Guidance on Spasticity Assessment and Management. AAPM&R will continue to use this model moving forward, with the goal of publishing two statements each year.

References

1.https://www.who.int/europe/news-room/fact-sheets/item/post-covid-19-condition

2.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8441918/

3.https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/pmrj.12684

4.https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/pmrj.12744

5.https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/pmrj.12745

6.https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pmrj.12859

7.https://www.aapmr.org/members-publications/covid-19/pasc-guidance