Last week marked one year mark since the first pandemic lockdown started and many of us took part in the one minute’s silence held on 23rd March to pay our sympathies and respects to the more than 126,000 individuals who have been lost to our communities. Looking forward, there is a sense of optimism on the horizon now that the vaccination programmes are being rolled out with huge success. Our healthcare teams around the country have risen to an unprecedented challenge and made massive contributions in response of the pandemic.
Our staff are still making fantastic efforts to deliver the best in health and social care research despite challenging circumstances, and our University colleagues continue to deliver education to the student body.
With pride we can reflect on how our researchers are leading work on disease susceptibility, treatments, the effectiveness of vaccines and other critical clinical aspects. Having been well supported by regulatory, funding and R&D teams.
Many personal and professional battles have been fought during the challenges of the past year and these make all of the achievements attained even more remarkable. Well done, we’re doing it. There is light at the end of the tunnel, and as the spring months extend into summer we can hopefully get back to enjoying what we did before.
For us this will be maintaining a sense of community and support for our clinical research teams, delivering training and education in both online and face-2-face formats and continuing to improve our learning and development offering so that we can respond to these types of events together.
Keep well, stay safe 🌈
