Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Research Protocols
Date Submitted: Jul 14, 2022
Open Peer Review Period: Jul 14, 2022 - Sep 8, 2022
Date Accepted: Jan 19, 2023
Date Submitted to PubMed: Mar 3, 2023
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Prospective evaluation of health care services for children and adolescents with post-COVID-19 condition in Bavaria, Germany: study protocol
ABSTRACT
Background:
Some children and adolescents suffer from late effects of a SARS-CoV-2 infection despite frequently mild courses of the disease. Nevertheless, extensive care for Post-COVID in children and young people is not available yet. A comprehensive care network (“PoCo”) for children and adolescents with Post-COVID has been setup as a model project in Bavaria, Germany.
Objective:
The aim of this study is to evaluate the health care services provided within these network structures of care for children and adolescents with Post-COVID in a pre-post study design.
Methods:
It is envisaged to recruit 160 children and adolescents up to 17 years with Post-COVID who are diagnosed and treated in 16 participating outpatient clinics. Health care utilization, treatment satisfaction, PROs (Patient Reported Outcomes) related to health-related quality of life (primary endpoint), fatigue, post-exertional malaise and mental health will be assessed at different time points (at baseline, after four weeks, three months and six months) using routine data, interviews and self-report questionnaires.
Results:
The study is currently in the recruitment process. This will run from April 2022 until December 2022. Interim analyses will be carried out. A full analysis of the data will be conducted after recruitment is complete. The results will be published.
Conclusions:
The results will contribute to the evaluation of therapeutic services provided for Post-COVID in children and adolescents and avenues for optimizing care may be identified.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.