Specialized clinics to treat long COVID are in demand and physicians say they can't keep up

Dr. Neeja Bakshi, an internal medicine physician based in Edmonton, runs a post-COVID clinic out of her private practice to help patients with long COVID.

Since it opened last fall, Bakshi says demand is so high that patients getting referrals now have to wait until November to get their first appointment. She's getting five referrals per day for post-COVID treatment, which is double what her clinic gets for general internal medicine. 

She's also getting referrals from other provinces: B.C., Ontario and Manitoba. 

"It feels great that I'm providing a service that can help so many people," said Bakshi. "But it's also an incredible pressure because I know that I can't see everybody and I know that I'm not going to be able to provide the care that I want if I'm burnt out."

Doctors say demand is growing for specialized clinics to treat post-COVID condition, also known as long COVID, in part due to increased awareness of what symptoms are. While clinics have opened in a number of locations, the wait lists are also growing. With a lack of funding and staffing, physicians say they can't keep up. 

Dr. Kieran Quinn, clinician scientist at Sinai Health and the University of Toronto, is leading a large research program looking at health services for people with post-COVID condition. 

Quinn says doctors across the country are starting to see increased volumes of requests for referrals for these specialized clinics.

At the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, run by the University Health Network in Toronto, wait times have recently jumped from weeks to months, he said. 

"Our colleagues in different provinces are reporting up to six months wait time to get into these clinics and then around the world, the reported wait times in places like Italy, the U.K. and the United States — these clinics are often seven to nine month wait times," Quinn said. 

At Bakshi's long-COVID clinic, patients are first tested for acute infections in their organs and then given a quality-of-life assessment. 

"I use that as kind of my starting point to say, where do we want to get to between now and our next visit? And we look at both pharmacotherapy [medication], rehab, allied health, anything that we think that will help this patient," she said. 

The clinic, part of Park Integrative Health, has other health professionals on site, such as physiotherapists and dieticians, but Bakshi is the only doctor there that sees long-COVID patients. 

She believes the demand is caused by increasing recognition of what post-COVID symptoms are, by health care providers and patients. 

"One of the things I'm seeing in the majority of my patients is a high heart rate or something called POTS [postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome]," she said.