Reflecting on COVID-19 Research: Five Years On

Presentations began with the driving forces behind Birmingham City University’s Centre for International Health Partnerships, Professor of Community Health Care Studies, Joy Notter and Associate Professor Chris Carter. Together, Chris and Joy have worked in 12 countries over more than two decades to capacity strengthen critical care nursing and education. 

Before the pandemic, critical care in low-income countries received little recognition. However, COVID-19 turned this around, with increasing recognition of the importance of critical care achieving universal coverage.

In a UKRI and Newton funded project from 2020-2022, our research focused on training healthcare workers and developing higher education pathways for critical care nurses. Zambia now serves as a regional education hub, attracting students from Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Lesotho with Master’s and Bachelor’s nursing courses. 

Between December 2023 and February 2024, oxygen training was delivered across 17 hospitals with 76 participants completing a training workshop and 672 healthcare workers completing cascade training within hospitals.  

During their work in the pandemic, the team also noticed that many patients were losing weight in the intensive care unit. This led to developing a low cost, highly sustainable enteral nutrition project, which they are now seeking donations to sustain. 

Associate Professor in Research Practice, Sian Vaughan, explores the challenges faced by creative postgraduate researchers during the pandemic: “Privilege and Practice – Challenges for Doctoral Education in Art and Design”.

Reflecting on their adaptations, mitigations and survival tactics, Sian speculates on how we might learn from their experiences to better support hybrid or remote doctoral study.

Her findings highlight the importance of blended supervision, community, and the importance of physical space for creative practice, as well as the intersectional barriers created by limited resources in practice-based research.

Tony Whyton, Professor of Jazz Studies, published Encountering the Plague: Humanities Take on the Pandemic. 

Speculating on perspectives from history, archaeology, law, theology, linguistics, electronic literature, medical humanities, film studies, media and cultural studies, performance studies and musicology, the publication compares the relationship between pandemics and the human condition. 

Tony discusses four themes emerging from the research that have as much relevance to societal challenges today than they did 5 years ago. This includes changes to rights and social rituals, the place of history in understanding and debate, post-truth and the challenges of new media and creative responses to crises. 

Professor Mark Radford is currently National Director of Long-Term Workforce Plan for Delivery, Director of Education and Training and Deputy Chief Nursing Officer for England. Mark graduated with his PhD, Advance Practice Nursing PgDip, Nursing BSc (Hons) from BCU.   

The biggest challenge Mark has faced during his working career has been working to support the delivery of the NHS in the response to the pandemic, where he had a huge influence ensuring the success in delivery of 15 million vaccinations.  

Mark discussed personal anecdotes of working through this time, recognising the psychological impact it has imprinted on the healthcare workforce and the nation.

Senior lecturer in Art and Design, Lisa Metherell, discusses her ongoing collaboration with Cathy Wade, Course Leader MA Arts and Education Practices, to creatively unpack experiences of lockdown for carers and lecturers.

They have been working through points of collapse, precarity and uncertainty, failure, trauma and joy during the pandemic in personal and institutional digital archives. Lockdown moments have been reconstructed in conversation, collaborative writing and image making. Lisa suggests that a commitment to co-production can help to produce more coherently complex narratives around lockdown, perhaps reducing feelings of overwhelm today. 

Damian Breen, Associate Professor in Criminology, challenges the racialized narratives that portrayed Muslim communities as resistant to public health measures during the pandemic in his publication Islam and faith in times of crisis: Religious observance and Muslim communities in the pandemic. By gathering real-world data from Muslim communities, the study highlights leadership in responding to COVID-19 and provides a counter-narrative to discriminatory media portrayals.

Senior Research Fellow, Dr. Kate Carruthers Thomas performed her poem, Poetry in Emotion: Writing Up Emotional Labour, which was inspired by her research into the challenges faced by female academics during the pandemic. Her study highlights the impact on productivity, career progression, and the emotional labour women experienced during this time. 

The poem was created using primary data gathered in open format diary entries and semi-structured interviews from 25 female academics across 18 UK universities. In the poetry performance, these perspectives are juxtaposed with text, visuals and audio.

Senior Lecturer in Data Science, Ogerta Elezaj, has been developing deep learning models to improve the diagnosis of COVID-19 through chest X-ray analysis. 

Findings from this project highlighted the potential of deep learning in automating COVID-19 diagnosis, reducing reliance on manual interpretation and enhancing healthcare efficiency.

The pandemic was particularly problematic for school music education, where music-making and creating was significantly hindered. Anthony Anderson, Associate Professor in Music Education, has been working with Key Stage 3 Music to identify how COVID-19 continues to impact educational experiences.  

Anthony explores how ‘COVID-19 safe’ environments impacted accessibility to music education for young people, and themes such as teaching music unmusically, destabilised musical collaborations and shifting music teacher identities. He suggests that hidden impacts of interpretations of what was permittable during the pandemic have become part of unspoken framing of music opportunity in school curricula. 

Dr. Hannah Malpass, Lecturer in Primary Education and Community Studies, highlights the negative impact of the pandemic on young people’s social skills, mental health, and development. Her project proposes a new framework to understand how restricted access to cultural capital has affected children’s bioecology.

Professor Judith Dyson’s research aimed to improve clinical practices during the pandemic by applying behaviour change techniques. The research programme included practical assignments to improve health care practices, such as hand hygiene, use of personal protective equipment, and the correct allocation of positive and negative COVID-19 patients.