COVID-19

Experts from across the UK - including The University of Aberdeen - have carried out a rapid review of evidence to help policy makers decide how to reopen dental services after the lockdown ends.  All the sources investigated by the team emphasised the need to focus on activities that minimise risk to staff, patients and the public but still support high quality clinical care.  More clarity, they say, is required on effective cleaning and disinfection processes, including the impact on patient scheduling and practice workflow.  Most of the sources investigated by the group recommended patient triage by telephone; some recommend temperature screening at reception.  The majority also recommended avoiding aerosol generating procedures wherever possible.

For more information click here.

Click here to view the news item on the review.

In response to the rapidly evolving situation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and following a specific request from Dr Paul Bachoo, Medical Director Acute Sector NHS Grampian, we conducted a rapid review of existing guidance documents and reports from national and international organisations and relevant articles published in the literature on hospital discharge criteria and services requirements for COVID-19 patients.  

You can view the rapid review here

This project will complete a tool (called the INCLUDE Ethnicity Framework) that trial designers together with patient and public partners  can use to make sure they think about factors that affect BAME involvement such as disease, culture, treatment being tested and trial information and procedures.  It will also help people interpreting and reporting COVID-19 trials to make judgements about the applicability of trial results to BAME communities.  The INCLUDE Ethnicity Framework will be equally useful for helping to make sure that non-COVID trials consider ethnicity too.  

Click here for more information.

A range of collective terms have recently been used in the UK to describe ethnic minority groups, including BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic), BME (Black Minority Ethnic), ethnic minority, non-white, and people of colour. BAME or BME are frequently used in the UK, but are problematic as they indiscriminately combine individuals of different geographical, behavioural, social and cultural backgrounds. Furthermore, the term BAME has been criticised due to its emphasis on skin colour and lack of specificity, so the question is what term(s) should we use?

Click here for more information.

The Trial Forge team are providing materials that may be relevant to the response to COVID-19.  These materials will fall into two categories:

• Materials that may support those designing and running COVID-19 trials.
• Materials that may support those whose non-COVID trials have been affected by COVID-19 and may be struggling to continue or complete.

Our key resources are Evidence packs, which will provide up-to-date summaries of evidence for trial process interventions, especially in recruitment and retention, and recommendations regarding their use.  The packs contain materials and information to make it easier to implement the intervention, as well as information about further evaluation. 

Please visit the Trial Forge COVID-19 page for further information.

Research being undertaken by the University of Birmingham and the University of Aberdeen seeks to collect and draw attention to the experiences of primary care professionals at this time of Covid-19. Professor Judith Smith is leading a project in conjunction with Professor Louise Locock at the University of Aberdeen, and Emily Burn at HSMC, with support from the Health Foundation, to capture the real-time stories of GPs, practice nurses and managers.

Please click here for more information.

This research is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), as part of UK Research and Innovation’s rapid response to Covid-19 and will attend carefully to what people consider good and right (or not) and why in different circumstances. We will develop practical ethical analyses of post-death care that address tensions between different purposes of funerals and diverse perspectives on post-death responsibilities.  This project is led by Vikki Entwistle.

Please click here for more information.

Funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the project is a collaboration with community organisations that work with ethnic minority communities. Our work will draw on the global literature on attitudes to COVID-19 and other similar vaccines among ethnic minority groups and combine this with the lived-experience of our community partners to develop recommendations for improving the roll-out of the COVID-19 vaccine to ethnic minority groups.  

For more information please click here.

Efforts to curtail the spread of COVID-19 by restricting in-person contacts prompted a widespread shift to conducting healthcare consultations via telephone or an internet-based video link (remote consultations).  

The findings from this research will be used to inform the ongoing development of practical support and training offered by the NHS Year of Care Programme (YOCP), and guidance about any modifications that healthcare professionals can use in remote CSP consultations to mitigate the potential downsides of the technology. 

For more information click here.

This is a qualitative video- and audio- interview study with ~45 people. We are undertaking in depth interviews with people have experience of the longer-term effects of COVID-19, exploring the effect Long COVID-19 has had and continues to have on their lives, including their: symptoms; access to and experience of services; information, support and care needs.

Click here to find out more.

The aim of this rapid review of international guidance was to assess how dental aerosol-generating procedures (AGPs) were defined in international dental guidelines and what mitigation procedures were recommended to support decision making concerning the planned re-opening and restructuring of dental services during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Click here to find out more.