Spotlight on Long Covid

Dr Elaine Maxwell is Scientific Advisor at NIHR. Prior to this she was a content lead in the NIHR’s dissemination centre and is the lead author on the two dynamic reviews of evidence on Long Covid, published in October 2020 and March 2021.

Elaine has also been both an Executive Director and a Non-Executive Director in NHS Foundation Trusts.

Dr Melissa Heightman specialises in interstitial lung disease and integrated respiratory medicine. She qualified from the University of Cambridge in 2000 and trained in respiratory medicine at the Brompton Hospital and in North London and held a Wellcome Trust Clinical Training Fellowship from 2007 to 2011.

She is a member of the clinical leadership group of the London Respiratory Clinical Network which develops guidance for London in meeting respiratory priorities in the NHS long term plan and relating to the COVID19 pandemic.

Dr Heightman has been clinical lead for the COVID follow up service at the trust which is a multi-professional and multispeciality service that integrates with community assessment and community rehabilitation services. She is a member of the NHSE task force considering COVID follow up service development and the NICE guideline group looking at the management of the long-term effects of COVID19. She has a broad interest in the transformation of outpatient services and in developing new models of care for long term conditions across the integrated care system.

Paul Elliott is a clinical professor of epidemiology and public health medicine in the School of Public Health at Imperial College London, and an honorary consultant in public health at the Imperial College NHS Healthcare Trust. His research program focuses on improving the understanding of the role of environmental and genetic factors in human health. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and recently awarded CBE for services to public health.

Paul Elliott is Director of the MRC Centre for Environment and Health at Imperial, a major international collaborative centre for environmental sciences research and training, and Director of the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit for Chemical and Radiation Threats & Hazards. He is an associate director of Health Data Research UK London, a founding member of the UK Biobank and a UKDRI Professor at the Imperial College Dementia Research Institute leading a programme in molecular epidemiology.  

He is director of the REal time Assessment of Community Transmission (REACT), a national programme of home testing for COVID-19 to track the progress of SARS-CoV-2 viral infections across England. He is also PI of two related studies: REACT-GE study “Multi-omics to identify biological pathways underlying severity of SARS-CoV-2 infection” working in collaboration with Genomics England”; and the REACT-Long COVID (REACT-LC) study, which is recruiting participants from REACT for follow-up to investigate variations in health, symptoms and experiences and testing samples for genetic and biological markers.