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In December, Annalisa Montesanti, Programme Manager for Research Careers at Health Research Board, celebrated the achievements of the Covid-19 rapid response research, launched by HRB in cooperation with the Irish Research Council (IRC) and Science Foundation Ireland (SFI). She shared highlights from the research published in the Coronavirus Collection, which provides a venue for the rapid dissemination of the latest research related to coronavirus, making the information publicly available so that others can respond effectively.

Today, we share the Q&As with three of the authors who were featured, for readers to gain deeper insight into the undergoing investigations that were highlighted. The three interviewees discuss three valuable projects; one to influence health policies, one to safeguard human participants in clinical trials, and one to provide much needed mental health support to healthcare workers on the frontline.

How to improve the psychological support of frontline healthcare workers

Q&A with Laura O’Connor, School of Psychology, National University of Ireland, Galway about identifying the needs and developing best practice guidance for the psychological support of frontline healthcare workers during and after COVID-19.

What is the FLoWS project?

The Frontline Worker Support (FLoWS) project aims to develop best practice guidelines for alleviating psychological distress in frontline healthcare workers (FLWs) throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and other public health emergencies. Data collected directly from FLWs in an online questionnaire and in one-on-one interviews will feed into the development of draft guidelines, which will then go through a validation process where a panel of stakeholders will review and amend the proposed guidelines to ensure they are suitably applicable and practical for broad implementation.

What are you working on?

There are currently no evidence-based guidelines for alleviating psychological distress in FLWs during pandemics. As occupational stress is a significant contributor to burnout, medical errors, and resignation in healthcare settings, a guideline to promote psychological wellbeing in FLWs is crucial to maximize workplace efficacy, patient safety, and availability of healthcare staff throughout pandemics.

How can this support healthcare workers?

We want to provide mental health professionals with an evidence-driven, stakeholder-informed framework from which decisions can be made regarding the promotion of psychological wellbeing in FLWs. We hope that these guidelines promote greater availability of mental health services tailored to the specific psychological needs of FLWs during the pandemic.

Why did you choose to publish on HRB Open Research and what does open research mean to you?

As promoting psychological wellbeing in FLWs is of immediate importance, publishing with HRB Open ensures rapid dissemination of our protocol to other researchers and stakeholders in this area. Similarly, as addressing the problems faced by FLWs is dependent on the contributions of many academic disciplines, an open peer-review platform ensures that experts from numerous academic backgrounds can provide insights towards the rationale, justification, and methodologies proposed within the FLoWS project, and that these insights can be incorporated transparently and the evolution of the protocol tracked through public version updates.

Following social distancing rules?

Q&A with Chris Noone, School of Psychology, National University of Ireland, Galway on collecting the evidence on the behavioural determinants of adherence to social distancing measures in research on COVID-19. 

What inspired you to explore adherence to social distancing measures?

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and particularly in the absence of a vaccine, it has been clear that our behaviour would be the strongest determinant of the extent to which COVID-19 is transmitted from person to person. The set of behaviours that come under the umbrella of “social distancing” were quite unfamiliar to people in everyday life and therefore also quite new as an area of investigation for many behavioural scientists. The social distancing measures that we’ve seen during this pandemic are unprecedented in terms of the scale and severity and we wanted to see how the behavioural sciences responded to that.

You published a Study Protocol – what do you think are the benefits of this article type for this study?

We chose to write a study protocol because we wanted to conduct this study as transparently as possible. It was one of a number of actions that we took in this project to adhere to principles of Open Science. We see Open Science as an integral tool in the fight against COVID-19 and we wanted to practice what we preach.

What steps did you take to ensure the results are accessible and your study is reproducible?

We are documenting our work using Open Science Framework and the papers that we screened are available in a publicly accessible Zotero Group Library. Since our exact search strategies for each of the databases and pre-print repositories that we searched are available, and our screening approach is documented on our published protocol, anyone should be able to reproduce this scoping review.

What impact do you hope your study will have?

This scoping review captures the rapid response to the need to study a unique set of behaviours in a novel context. We discuss this in relation to both further research related to COVID-19 and scientific responses to large-scale health emergencies in the future. We also hope that our study can be useful for those developing interventions aimed at increasing adherence to social distancing measures.

Why did you choose to publish on HRB Open Research and what does open research mean to you?

Trust in science is hugely important for public health. If we want the public to trust science and scientists, we should act in ways that earn trust. We believe that by adhering to Open Science principles that we do exactly that.

How to ensure medical research is conducted safely, as well as quickly, during the pandemic

Q&A with Lydia O’Sullivan, School of Medicine, University College Dublin, and HRB-Trials Methodology Research Network, Ireland on ethical considerations for safeguarding human participants in research.

Why is there a need to investigate ethical standards in Covid-19 clinical research?

It is vitally important that clinical research takes place during a pandemic. However, research participants may be more vulnerable in a pandemic situation because of illness and reduced contact with family, friends or physicians who would normally support their decision-making.  Therefore, it is important to preserve public confidence by doing good quality research and by stating in publications if ethical safeguards were in place to protect human participants.

What change could this have on future clinical research proposals?

We hope that our review will highlight whether COVID-19 clinical research publications report compliance with internationally accepted ethical standards such as the Declaration of Helsinki, ICH-GCP, participant confidentiality and informed consent. We also aim to provide a description of how an Irish Research Ethics Committee adapted their working practices to provide timely yet thorough ethical review of clinical research proposals during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Why did you choose to publish on HRB Open Research and what does open research mean to you?

We opted for HRB Open Research because we wished to publish quickly and openly, especially given our publication related to COVID-19.