Capturing Covid-19 learnings to shape the future

Coronavirus has affected all of our lives – challenging our ability to adapt and be resilient.

With the outbreak of coronavirus being declared a pandemic we are facing a major challenge both personally and professionally. Coronavirus has significantly affected our lives, it is also challenging our ability to adapt and be resilient. We are in a state of rapid change, and must respond with different ways of working, learning and communicating.

Online working and virtual meetings are no longer new to us. However, Covid-19 is reviving the need to explore learning opportunities, our behaviour and culture as a Partnership.

Cumbria and North East Integrated Care System is working in partnership with the Academic Health Science Network North East and North Cumbria with the support of the Yorkshire and Humber Academic Health Science Network.

Earlier this year, we invited colleagues to share their views, so that we can understand and capture the learning and innovation that is emerging.

Innovations which would ordinarily have taken months if not years to achieve, are being implemented during the pandemic.  This is an area we wanted to explore; particularly what are the changes we want to embed, what do we want to stop and what alternatives we want to pursue?

The work had three areas of focus:

  • A continual learning, innovation, improvement and evaluation process, balanced with a practical need for rapid implementation of change as we move forward.
  • Build upon our current understanding of what has happened during the pandemic
  • Identifying behavioural, culture change and specific innovations we want to leave behind or embrace.

We invited colleagues to get involved and share views in several ways:

  • Completing an online survey
  • Sharing with us any capture of learning already done
  • Participate in semi-structured interviews to gain deeper insights

This was fed into a report to reflect the work being done across the region. The work we are doing is not intended to replace or duplicate existing work taking place. We want it to support existing work whilst following the principles of sharing learning and good practice and scaling up what has worked well across Cumbria and the North East.

Final Reports

The final reports are now available to download by clicking on the links below:

Initial reflections on our response to COVID-19 across North East and North Cumbria ICS

Health Call Digital Care Homes 

Mental Health Resources

Smokefree NHS Programme in NENC

Using Video Consultations for Autism Assessments