State health systems are not equipped to handle cases of long-COVID among children, medical experts have revealed.
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A parliamentary inquiry examining long-COVID has been told the lack of a definition for the illness is impacting treatment of young people.
Associate professor Philip Britton from the Sydney Children's Hospital Network told the committee a coordinated system was needed that could escalate care needs when required.
"The health system in my setting, in NSW, is not well set up to appropriately respond to long-COVID and post-COVID conditions in children at this point in time," he said.
"We do not have a well-coordinated system for assessing and managing children, we're also not defining the condition well enough to then inform clinical practice at a primary care level."
The inquiry was told a survey of families of children known to the hospital network found between three and five per cent of kids still had persistent COVID-19 symptoms 12 weeks after their infection.
While Dr Britton said symptoms were often milder in children and resolved over time, about one per cent of children still had persistent symptoms that impacted on their day-to-day functioning.
He said children with long-COVID were more likely to be older than 10, with girls more represented than boys.
"There is no dedicated long-COVID or post-COVID condition service as yet in NSW," he said.
"That complicates the process of children and families accessing appropriate care."
Brendan McMullan, a paediatric infectious diseases specialist at the Sydney Children's Hospital, called for a community-based model for dealing with long-COVID cases, in particular in treating multiple people in the same family.
"There's some evidence that suggests that children who have family members with long-COVID may be more likely to have it themselves," Dr McMullan said.
"There are kind of additional challenges with managing long-COVID and post-COVID conditions in children."
The parliamentary inquiry is looking into the patient experience of long-COVID and its treatment, as well as the experience of healthcare providers.
The committee is also examining the impact of long-COVID on the broader health system.
Dr Brett Gardiner, a rehab medicine specialist from Sydney's Westmead Hospital, told the committee an online platform specifically targeted to meet the needs of long-COVID patients in the UK should be rolled out here in Australia.
"That's an efficient way of doing things and also being able to get things out for the population," he said.
"What we need there is the GPs to be able to be educated and have a particular set of guidelines, questionnaires, inventions and so forth as the baseline for this."
However, Golo Ahlenstiel from the Western Sydney Local Health District said there were still many unknowns when it came to dealing with long-COVID.
Professor Ahlenstiel said the medical futures of many people who contracted COVID-19 were uncertain.
"Long-COVID is a syndrome, it's not a very well defined disease where I just do a test and then address the disease," he said.
"The other problem is that the patients that were admitted to hospital are relatively easy (to identify health issues), because we already know where their problems are and what they might need in the future.
"What we don't know is what happened to all these other 40,000 patients in our community, and what will be their long term health problems."
Australian Associated Press
