A Long Road Back: Supporting a Patient Through Shared Care in London
Dr Minha and coordinator Anne Stewart accompanied a Long Covid patient to London’s Cromwell Hospital for shared care not available in Scotland.
Sometimes the treatment a patient needs simply isn’t available where they live. When that happened for one patient with Long Covid, Dr Minha and Curaidh Clinic’s clinic coordinator, Mrs Anne Stewart, travelled with her to the Cromwell Hospital in London in September 2025, the Bupa-owned specialist hospital on Cromwell Road that has treated complex cases from around the world since 1981, for a shared-care procedure not offered in Scotland.
Getting her there was itself an act of care. The patient, from Glasgow, had become so unwell and breathless that she was bedbound; she was flown down, and Dr Minha, already in London, met her at the hospital to oversee her treatment alongside the resident team. This is what shared care means in practice, not a referral into the void, but a clinician bridging what a patient can access locally with what they genuinely need, wherever in the country it happens to be, and staying involved throughout.
Long Covid remains one of the defining challenges of contemporary medicine: a cluster of persistent, often disabling symptoms, profound fatigue, breathlessness, brain fog and more, that can linger for months or years after the initial infection, and for which mainstream services are still building their response. It sits squarely within Curaidh Clinic’s focus on complex, chronic and frequently misunderstood conditions, and demands exactly the kind of patient, individualised, joined-up care this journey exemplified.
The postscript is the part Dr Minha treasures most. The following Christmas Day, a message arrived from the patient: for the first time in four years, she had been well enough to cook Christmas dinner.
