Warwick Health GRP: Response to the Covid-19 Pandemic

Friday 17 July 2020 - 12.15pm-1.15pm

Registration

This session will be recorded.

Medical Device and Personal Protective Equipment: the contribution of the international community of biomedical engineers - Dr Leandro Pecchia, Associate Professor, School of Engineering

The COVID pandemic highlighted the importance of medical devices and PPE, the frailty of their supply chains, and the dependence of the NHS's by devices and equipment experts, such as biomedical and clinical engineers. This talk will give a global view on the current importance of devices and equipment for modern medicine, with a particular focus on COVID and in general to disaster preparedness. Finally, Dr Pecchia will present the work the global community of biomedical land clinical engineers have done, in coordination with the WHO, in response to this pandemic.

The challenge of COVID-19 pandemic on Laboratory Medicine clinical services: identifying opportunities for research and innovation - Professor Dimitris Grammatopoulos, Professor, WMS Molecular Medicine

In March 2020 the health and care system in the UK faced a challenge the like of which has not been seen in living memory. Globally, the COVID-19 pandemic caused a crisis that stretched clinical and scientific services to the limit and forced the developed world to rethink how our significant resources are utilised. In this talk Professor Dimitris Grammatopoulos will describe his experiences in participating in the NHS's efforts to develop de novo COVID-19 laboratory services, some important knowledge gaps identified along the way and also examples of joint efforts between the University of Warwick and University Hospital Coventry & Warwickshire which were able to be kickstarted.

Stay Home and Stay Active? The impact of social distancing and stay-at-home restrictions on physical activity behaviour - Dr Mark Elliott, Associate Professor, Institute of Digital Healthcare, WMG, University of Warwick

While the “Stay At Home” restrictions have been necessary to tackle the spread of Coronavirus, it is highly likely that such restrictions will substantially reduce levels of physical activity and subsequently could impact mental and physical wellbeing over time Suppression of normal levels of physical activity has been shown to rapidly increase levels of depressive symptoms (Edwards & Loprinzi, 2016). Hence, there is a high risk of the current restrictions impacting on the mental health of usually active adults. This is in addition to those who were already somewhat sedentary (approx. 40% of the UK population; Guthold et al., 2018) and are now likely to have even further reduced activity levels (Qin et al., 2020). On other hand there are some who have benefited from the situation in terms of opportunities to develop new and increased physical activity routines.

It is therefore important to track and analyse how physical activity levels and wellbeing have changed over the duration of the restrictions and determine how different demographic groups and geographic areas are impacted.

In the webinar, Dr Mark Elliott will report our initial results from a large of survey of UK adults on how their physical activity has changed during the different phases of the restrictions, compared to the period prior to this. From this we can identify which groups may need additional interventions or incentives to increase their levels of physical activity in the post-COVID-19 period.