Cohort Profile: Post-hospitalisation COVID-19 study (PHOSP-COVID)

Key Features

The Post-Hospitalisation COVID-19 (PHOSP-COVID) study is a national UK multicentre cohort study of patients who were hospitalized for COVID-19 and subsequently discharged.

PHOSP-COVID was established to investigate the medium- and long-term sequelae of severe COVID-19 requiring hospitalization, understand the underlying mechanisms of these sequelae, evaluate the medium- and long-term effects of COVID-19 treatments and to serve as a platform to enable future studies, including clinical trials.

Data collected covered a wide range of physical measures, biological samples and patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs).

Participants could join the cohort either in Tier 1 only with remote data collection using hospital records, a PROMs app and postal saliva sample for DNA; or in Tier 2 in which they were invited to attend two specific research visits for further data collection and biological research sampling. These research visits occurred at 5 (range 2–7) months and 12 (range 10–14) months post-discharge. Participants could also participate in specific nested studies (Tier 3) at selected sites.

All participants were asked to consent to further follow-up for 25 years via linkage to their electronic healthcare records and to be re-contacted for further research.

In total, 7935 participants were recruited from 83 UK sites: 5238 to Tier 1 and 2697 to Tier 2, between August 2020 and March 2022.

Cohort data are held in a Trusted Research Environment and samples stored in a central biobank. Data and samples can be accessed upon request and subject to approvals from https://www.phosp.org/data-sample-request/.