COVID-19 impact on Radiography workforce and service provision in NI [COVID-19]
Research type
Research Study
Full title
An investigation into the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Diagnostic and Therapeutic Radiography workforce and service provision in Northern Ireland with a view to planning for future waves of the pandemic.\n
IRAS ID
287032
Contact name
Sonyia McFadden
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Ulster University
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 10 months, 31 days
Research summary
Since March 2020, resources within the health service in the UK have largely been directed to fighting COVID-19. Many outpatient clinics have been temporarily suspended and some surgical procedures have been postponed to facilitate redeployment and reskilling of staff to areas anticipated to need additional support. Healthcare staff who had left the NHS recently or recently retired professionals were asked to return to service. The capacity of intensive care facilities was increased with the creation of bespoke Nightingale hospitals to manage the anticipated surge of COVID-19 patients requiring high dependency care. The reshaping of the NHS was designed to enable the service to manage the pending crisis (Stevens and Prichard, 2020).\nIt is evident that behind the COVID-19 pandemic there is a parallel “epidemic“ happening simultaneously i.e. the wider impact on people’s health that is the result of dealing with the pandemic. Some of the indirect impacts on health are immediate and obvious to see however, a lot may take years to become apparent; later diagnoses for conditions like cancer may not show up in death figures for some time. It is predicted that the COVID-19 crisis could double the number of people waiting for NHS treatment to 10 million by the end of the year (Pym 2020).\nAs COVID-19 is a novel coronavirus there is a paucity of information in published literature exploring how radiographers coped with the sudden and dramatic changes in working practices delivering imaging and cancer treatment services across Northern Ireland. This study aims to explore the impact on radiography professionals delivering frontline services, identify what changes were made to existing patient protocols and identify what lessons can be learned to inform best practice for anticipated future waves of the pandemic. \n
REC name
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REC reference
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