Search

A set of interviews with NHS COVID-19 frontline staff to investigate the influence of COVID deployment on non-technical factors for healthcare delivery (leadership, social support & cohesion, communication, shared mental models, co-ordination) and expected moderating factors (occupational background, preparedness, work-life balance and home situation, proximity, workforce allocation models) and the impact on perceived teamwork, performance, individual team member well-being, resilience and team member employment retention intentions for NHS COVID-team members. The interviews with medical staff consisted of demographic questions collecting some special category data (e.g., ethnicity, job title, living arrangements during COVID), a 12-item standardised measure of wellbeing (administered using the GHQ-12, a short form General Health Questionnaire) and an 8 item Work Life Balance Scale (Schwartz et al., 2019; Sexton et al., 2017). These are not included in the interview transcripts. The interview schedule then followed a topic based semi-structured component (informed by themes identified in our previous work (Reid et al., 2018; 2016; Schilling, 2019), the wider literature, and our preliminary conceptual framework across these four main areas: 1) the creation of teams and the experience of teamwork, social support, shared communication patterns, co- ordination and mental models; 2) the role of leaders in establishing teamwork, social support, shared communication patterns, co-ordination and mental models; 3) perceived individual and team performance, well-being, resilience and retention intentions; 4) moderating factors including occupational background, preparedness, home life, work-life balance and any other issues arising during COVID-team membership.

This is a scoping review of published evidence and research on the potential solutions to the political, economic, administrative, regulatory, logistic, ethical and social (PEARLES) barriers and solutions to implementation of clinical research responses to high consequences infectious disease outbreaks of epidemic or pandemic potential. This work builds on previous work and is an update on our scoping review carried out in 2018. The results will be compared with our previous scoping review to identify if earlier proposed solutions have been tested and if there are persisting or new challenges and solutions to epidemic clinical research responses identified in more recent outbreaks, including the Covid-19 pandemic.

Background Highly infectious diseases (HIDs) are defined as being transmissible from person to person, causing life-threatening illnesses and presenting a serious public health hazard. The sampling, handling and transport of specimens from patients with HIDs present specific bio-safety concerns. Findings The European Network for HID project aimed to record, in a cross-sectional study, the infection control capabilities of referral centers for HIDs across Europe and assesses the level of achievement to previously published guidelines. In this paper, we report the current diagnostic capabilities and bio-safety measures applied to diagnostic procedures in these referral centers. Overall, 48 isolation facilities in 16 European countries were evaluated. Although 81% of these referral centers are located near a biosafety level 3 laboratory, 11% and 31% of them still performed their microbiological and routine diagnostic analyses, respectively, without bio-safety measures. Conclusions The discrepancies among the referral centers surveyed between the level of practices and the European Network of Infectious Diseases (EUNID) recommendations have multiple reasons of which the interest of the individuals in charge and the investment they put in preparedness to emerging outbreaks. Despite the fact that the less prepared centers can improve by just updating their practice and policies any support to help them to achieve an acceptable level of biosecurity is welcome.