Res Consortium responds to COVID-19 challenge.
23-Mar-2020: Having been involved in the pandemic planning for South London during Swine Flu in 2009, Res Consortium has a number of ‘out-of-the-box’ initiatives that can be quickly mobilised to support the health service during this rapidly developing situation. A number of the initiatives below are simple to deploy and have been updated and repurposed for the current Coronavirus pandemic. Targeting resources – as infections increase, demand may outstrip supply for certain resources as the supply chain struggles to respond. To help public health officials anticipate and plan for this Res consortium has released its COVID-19 pandemic planning tool into the public domain. This allows Public Health Professional, Commissioners, Consultants and General Practitioners to quick assess the risk to the populations they serve at neighbourhood-level so that they can plan and allocate frontline resources appropriately. Splitting Teams – Resilience of Team and Services is paramount as pressure mounts and team members showing symptoms begin to self-isolate. For this reason, splitting teams into shifts or smaller autonomous MDTs is an important change that service managers and leaders must consider, protecting staff from cross-infection and the service from business interruption. This is especially relevant in Primary Care where resilient front-line services will protect resources in hospital for the most unwell. Training and upskilling – the pandemic will see a return to work for many retired doctors and nurses, while medical professionals from other specialties will be redeployed and retrained for ICU. Postgraduate Medical Education will likely be repurposed to bring this new workforce up-to-speed, with the need to free-up simulation suites for acute care simulations, barrier-nursing and ICU workflows. Testing – testing is fundamental to any pandemic plan, however availability of tests will be restricted at first as manufacturing attempts to meet demand on any new tests provided, whether that be diagnostic testing for health and care professionals, key workers, admitted patients, and people showing symptoms in the community or antibody tests for people recovered from the disease, showing immune response. To assist in prioritisation, we would recommend a tiered response to testing with phased roll-out using our COVID Pandemic Planning Tool to identify neighbourhoods with a high risk profile. This will also help with logistics as NHS England attempts to deliver new tests to the front line.