Redeployment during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic: implications for a clinical research workforce

In December 2019, a previously unknown acute viral respiratory disease was identified in Wuhan, China. This disease, caused by a novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and now known as COVID-19, quickly began to spread across the world. On January 29 2020 the first two patients were diagnosed and quarantined in the UK (British Foreign Policy Group (BFPG), 2020). At the time of publication (mid-June 2021), UK COVID-19-related death rates sit at 127 926 from 4 589 814 known cases. Worldwide COVID-19-related deaths number 3 834 951 people, from 177 120 609 known global cases (John Hopkins University, 2021).

This emerging international healthcare crisis required the NHS to maximise its frontline workforce fast, allowing very little time for detailed planning due to the speed at which the pandemic was proliferating (Majersik and Reddy, 2020). The National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) responded to the COVID-19 crisis in March 2020. Those NIHR-funded clinical and academic health professionals, who were not already working on COVID-19-focused studies, were released to be redeployed as required within the NHS national pandemic response (NIHR 2020). Staff were thus redeployed to assist with the COVID-19 efforts, in both acute-care COVID-19 environments and COVID-19-focused clinical trials, with the remaining staff left to maintain pre-pandemic non-COVID-19 research. The exact number of NIHR-funded health professionals who were redeployed nationally is not currently available in the public domain; however, the reduction in staffing in existing research teams resulted in a much reduced capacity for non-COVID-19 research (NIHR, 2020). Consequently, research staff had to adapt quickly to new workloads and modified ways of working.