Patient-Led Research Collaborative: embedding patients in the Long COVID narrative

Patient-Centered Core Impact Sets: What They are and Why We Need Them

A quote attributed to Mark Twain states, “What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.” The growing focus on patient centricity has revealed a misalignment between what patients report as important to them about their disease and/or treatment, and the data collected in research and care. Decisions across healthcare are made using an evidence base most stakeholders acknowledge is inadequate. Patients might report that what is important to them are everyday life impacts, concepts that can be very different from the more typical clinical outcomes we often track. In this paper, we encourage expanding current thinking to all “impacts,” not only health outcomes, but also the other equally (and sometimes more important) concerns patients report as important to them. We propose that a patient-centered core impact set be developed for each disease or condition of interest, and/or subpopulation of patients. A patient-centered core impact set begins with gathering from patients and caregivers an inventory of all impacts disease and treatments have on a patient’s (and carers’ and families’) life. Then, through a formal prioritization process, a core set of impacts is derived, inclusive of but extending beyond relevant health outcomes. We offer several recommendations on how to move the goal of a patient-centered core impact set forward through collaboration, leadership, and establishment of a patient-centered core impact set development blueprint with supporting tools.

Social movement organizing and the politics of emotion from HIV to Covid-19

The Covid-19 pandemic has seen the rapid growth of collective organizing on the part of patient groups to address scientific and health inequities. This paper considers the emergence of Covid-19 activism as an embodied health movement that draws on and contributes to broader movements for racial, economic and gender justice. Recognizing the central role of emotion in social movements and in the bio-politics of Covid-19, I examine the key presence of the affective domain in social change through three Covid-19 social movement groups. These organizations draw upon anti-racist, feminist, and queer and HIV social movement organizing that position Covid movement building in intersectional histories and futures. I argue that Covid movement activists have built "archives of feeling"-or public cultures of trauma-of commemoration, Covid survivor narratives, and direct action that center affective feelings around grief, representation, and anger, respectively. I suggest that Covid-19 will become a key lens for articulating structural and social inequalities through which broader social movements will leverage their claims for justice-moving towards an integrated social movement. Social movement mobilizing will continue to play a critical role to ensure that the focus in the Covid-19 pandemic shifts from pathogen to society.