Abstract
Background: COVID-19 has tested healthcare and research systems around the world, forcing the large-scale reorganization of hospitals, research infrastructure and resources. The United Kingdom has been singled out for the speed and scale of its research response. The efficiency of the United Kingdom’s research mobilization was in large part predicated on the pre-existing embeddedness of the clinical research system within the National Health Service (NHS), a public, free-at-point-of-delivery healthcare system. In this paper we discuss the redeployment of the clinical research workforce to support the pandemic clinical services, detailing the process of organizing this redeployment, as well as the impacts redeployment has had on both staff and research delivery at one research-intensive acute NHS trust in London.
Methods: A social science case study of one large research-active NHS trust drawing on data from an online questionnaire; participant observation of key research planning meetings; semi-structured interviews with staff involved in research; and document analysis of emails and official national and trust communications.
Results: We found that at our case-study hospital trust, the research workforce was a resource that was effectively redeployed as part of the pandemic response. Research delivery workers were redeployed to clinical roles, to COVID-related research and to work maintaining the research system during the redeployment itself. Redeployed research workers faced some difficulties with technology and communication, but many had a positive experience and saw the redeployment as a significant and valuable moment in their career.
Conclusions: This study explicates the role of the research delivery workforce for the United Kingdom’s COVID response. Redeployed research workers facilitated the emergency response by delivering significant amounts of patient care. The public also benefited from having a well-developed research infrastructure in place that was able to flexibly respond to a novel virus. Many research workers feel that the NHS should provide more support for this distinctive workforce.
Methods: A social science case study of one large research-active NHS trust drawing on data from an online questionnaire; participant observation of key research planning meetings; semi-structured interviews with staff involved in research; and document analysis of emails and official national and trust communications.
Results: We found that at our case-study hospital trust, the research workforce was a resource that was effectively redeployed as part of the pandemic response. Research delivery workers were redeployed to clinical roles, to COVID-related research and to work maintaining the research system during the redeployment itself. Redeployed research workers faced some difficulties with technology and communication, but many had a positive experience and saw the redeployment as a significant and valuable moment in their career.
Conclusions: This study explicates the role of the research delivery workforce for the United Kingdom’s COVID response. Redeployed research workers facilitated the emergency response by delivering significant amounts of patient care. The public also benefited from having a well-developed research infrastructure in place that was able to flexibly respond to a novel virus. Many research workers feel that the NHS should provide more support for this distinctive workforce.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 68 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| Journal | Health Research Policy and Systems |
| Volume | 20 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 18 Jun 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Copyright © The Author(s) 2022. Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutoryregulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
Funding
DW, RFG, HC and CW are all funded by the NIHR (http:// nihr.ac.uk/) Biomedical Research Centre at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust and King’s College London (Grant number IS-BRC-1215-20006). The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NHS, the NIHR or the Department of Health and Social Care. NH is a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) 70@70 Senior Nurse and Midwife Research Leader. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of the NIHR.
Keywords
- Covid-19
- Clinical research
- Redeployment
- Research workforce
- National Health Service (NHS)