Beneficial innovations from the COVID-19 pandemic in Northern Ireland

COVID-19 has been the biggest challenge faced by the NHS in its history and many services have had to think on their feet to cope with the unprecedented demand for services and the need to keep patients and staff safe from the virus.

 

The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected older people – around half of diagnoses have been in people aged over 65 and more than 90% of deaths have been in that age group.

 

As such, our members have been at the forefront of this pandemic, working in acute, primary and community care with older people who have COVID-19 and continuing to help people without COVID-19 to manage their long-term conditions and remain healthy.

 

They have implemented changes to practice to enable them to continue to provide high quality care to their patients while ensuring that they and their patients are protected from the risk of contracting COVID-19. Many of these changes have shown better ways of working and our members believe they should be retained and shared more widely as we move out of the pandemic.

 

This report has been adapted from one written in response to a request from NHS England and NHS Improvement for examples of beneficial innovations across the NHS that have been implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic and should be retained as the NHS starts to resume business as usual. Where possible we have provided examples of beneficial innovations provided by BGS members in Northern Ireland. However, we have also retained some of the examples from England as there is no reason why these cannot be replicated in Northern Ireland.