A Long COVID-19 Student-delivered program - a randomised controlled trial comparing the effectiveness of multiple sessions of chronic disease management to a single session of the same program.

Chronic disease management, tailored to the participant's symptoms and goals, will be delivered in the form of health coaching. The intervention will be delivered by pre-registration health professional students (dietetics, occupational therapy, paramedicine, physiotherapy, social work) under the supervision of health professionals from their own profession with at least 3 years experience. We will use a two-group, randomised controlled trial design with primary outcome measurement at 3 months. The intervention group - Group 2 will have up to 12 sessions of the intervention before the outcomes measured at 3 months; followed by a second measure of outcomes at 6 months. The chronic disease self management sessions will consist of the identification and prioritisation of participant problems; shared goal setting and then shared decision making about actions to reach these goals. Scripts have been developed in surveys to guide the conversations between the students and the participants. Sessions will be delivered one-on-one by telephone, video conference or face to face and will last for up to an hour each. They will be scheduled at times suited to the participant and may be up to weekly. Students will record notes during each attendance about conversations and progress towards goals. Participants will be given an information booklet designed by the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners https://www.racgp.org.au/clinical-resources/covid-19-resources/patient-resources/patient-resource-managing-post-covid-19-symptoms/introduction Exercise advise will be given using the Borg pacing protocol outlined in https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jmv.28373 Before the students engage with any participants, they must have completed 10 hours of online telehealth training and 3 hours of training specifically designed to inform them about Long COVID aetiology and symptoms, impact on daily life, symptom management and this research trial, including the screening tool and outcome measures. The online training platform allows supervisors to check that students have completed the training. They also need to record mock participant interactions and these are graded as pass or fail by a supervisor. Students cannot begin interacting with participants until they have completed the training and passed the assessments.