The CLAP Study. Caring, Learning And Pandemic response during COVID-19: Staff experience of working in critical care

Staff experience is central to the quality of healthcare, as well as being an important outcome in and of itself. The current coronavirus outbreak has placed unprecedented demands on critical care units in the UK and has changed the way NHS staff work. We do not know how these changes have affected staff, what helps them to cope and what hinders, or how they could be supported better, both now and in future outbreaks. The aim of this research is to understand the experiences of frontline NHS staff, both critical care and redeployed staff, working on critical care units during the coronavirus outbreak in order to inform professional practice and make recommendations to healthcare managers about how best to support staff both now and in the future. We will interview around 30 staff, including doctors, nurses and healthcare assistants. We will ask them about their experience of changes in working practice, interaction with patients, using tablets and telephones for family communication, end of life, learning and training during the pandemic, and personal wellbeing and support. We will analyse the data using rapid methods so that we can feed the findings back to healthcare managers and educators quickly.