Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a dramatic effect on people’s lives globally. For academics working in fields such as primary care and public health, the pandemic led to major changes in professional roles. Universities across the United Kingdom closed their campuses in March 2020 and switched to remote working. Staff began to work from home and teaching of students moved online. University staff rapidly had to put in place systems for teaching, monitoring and assessing students remotely. For many universities, these changes will be in place until the end of 2020, with no return to a more normal mode of working until January 2021 at the earliest.
Academics learned new ways of working, with all meetings taking place virtually using tools such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom. New research projects on COVID-19 were rapidly developed. The usual approval processes for research studies were speeded up, with research protocols being written, approved by ethics committees and studies starting up in a few weeks rather than the several months it might have taken previously.
There were additional changes too for academics who also worked as clinicians in NHS primary care. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the majority of consultations were carried out face-to-face. In mid-March, general practices across the UK switched to a model where nearly all consultations with patients were carried out by telephone or video call. 1 Clinicians began to make greater use of information technology; for example, to send documents to patients electronically. We saw a fall in the total number of attendances in general practice and in urgent care. 2 This fall is now gradually being reversed and we are beginning to see a return to more normal consultation rates. Face-to-face consultations are also beginning to increase but they are unlikely to return to pre-pandemic levels and we are likely to see a permanent increase the proportion of consultations carried out remotely.
Academics who were also public health specialists worked with local and national NHS colleagues to better understand the impact of COVID-19 on the population, and how we could address its direct and indirect consequences. Many mistakes were made by the UK’s political leaders, resulting in the UK having one of the world’s highest death rates from COVID-19. 3 In the longer term, we will need to learn the appropriate lessons from our experience. 4 This may require a restructuring of Public Health England to create a separate national infection control service led by experienced consultants in communicable disease control so that we are better prepared for future epidemics.
