Lay summary
The Long COVID Registry was established to estimate the clinical, quality-of-life and economic impacts of long COVID in Aotearoa New Zealand, while providing a mechanism to continually monitor health outcomes and inequities. Nearly all registry participants consented to be followed up for further research and/or to have their registry data linked to the Stats NZ Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI). This Activation Grant will engage with individuals with lived experience – via Long Covid Support Aotearoa – to co-create research questions that can be answered in future research projects. These may include understanding the clinical diagnosis of long COVID in primary care, or the impact of long COVID on employment, benefits and retirement. The grant will design robust methodologies for these research questions to be explored in future research, e.g. analysing free text and diagnostic codes in primary care data, or the use of matched individuals in linked datasets.