Environment submissions database

Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, University of Cumbria (UoC) prioritised the health and safety of its university community, its students and staff. Like many institutions, our staff focussed on ensuring that students were able to complete their programmes and graduate in 2020, and then subsequently, that a blended approach to learning could be implemented for the start of the 2020/21 academic year. Our Institute of Health staff were additionally diverted to prepare a cohort of students to join North Cumbria Integrated Care NHS Foundation Trust in response to the NHS’s call for help. Within this context, UOC put a number of measures in place to ensure that staff and PGRs could continue to research productively. This included extensive arrangements for flexible working, consideration of a range of individual circumstances (such as child care, caring responsibilities etc.), and various measures to support student and staff health and wellbeing. Institutional support for remote working and video communication tools (already heavily utilised owing to our dispersed sites) enabled students, academic and professional services staff to rapidly transition to online formats without significant or detrimental impact. This served to provide a degree of continuity to the institutions research environment and regards to impact generation and measurement. In some cases the pandemic did impact the ability of our staff to undertake research or impact work, including delays in studies requiring face to face interactions, international travel, industry engagement and knowledge exchange events, field work, and internal research events. This has invariably impacted on aspects of the institutions REF submission, including research income and a number of PGR completions, but mitigations have been effectively managed and implemented by the REF Steering Group. In many cases, the transition to online has actually increased engagement in research events and seminars, and we are using these insights and best practices to inform our future approach to the institutional research environment. UOC also diverted internal research funding to support investigations into the Covid-19 pandemic. As an example, Prof Kaz Stuart conducted research on the biological, social and psychological impacts of Covid-19 on the general public. Capturing 400 responses to this call for data, we have data shared to gain another 12,000 respondents with Edukit and Healthwatch. Reports have been sent to a range of stakeholders (local governance and community and voluntary sector organisations) as well as being submitted to the Select Committee call for evidence for Covid-19. UOC also supported business and individual resilience, with weekly online resilience masterclasses (700+ international participants) and actively identified research staff to engage with the Cumbria LEPs Business and Economic Response and Recovery Group.