So can you start by saying your name and your current sort of position in life?
Okay. Well, I'm Liz Green Hall and I'm a retired doctor.
I was a GP and I worked in public health as well as a public health consultant.
And now I don't do anything medical at all.
So I'm just going back to. Without telling me your entire life history.
But going back to how you first got interested in medicine, can you just take me through your career?
Oh, that's difficult, I suppose. At school, I was at the kind of school where medicine was quite encouraged.
My mother had wanted to do medicine, but was of the generation where women didn't do that kind of thing.
So then I drifted into it the way you do and did medicine in Oxford and then in London and did some paediatrics.
We then came back to Oxford because my husband had a consulting job here and I decided I wanted to do
general practice and then got interested in public health and did a public health training as well,
and ended up running the family planning service in Oxfordshire,
which sort of combined doing clinical work and public health because we were developing
services for young people and setting up clinics in schools and that kind of thing.
Does that involve any research? No, not really.
That was very practical service organisation and clinical work.
Yeah, but it meant that you were spending a lot of time with young people.
Yes. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And also spending time with people outside medicine, because when you're trying to set up services over young people,
you need to get involved with social services, with schools, GP's, nurses.
I enjoyed that kind of wide, wider range of people that you had, you had to liaise with and work with and parents as well.
So. And when when did you formally retire?
Oh, 2007. Right. Okay.
And did you stop doing anything medical? I did. I did.
I felt you either did it properly or not at all kind of thing.
Yeah. And I had my first grandchild then, so it was a nice time to stop.
Mm hmm. Mm hmm. So going back to thinking about the the early days of the pandemic, when did you first become aware that there was something going on?
Well, actually, it was very strange. I was in Ethiopia on holiday.
When you're on holiday, you don't get much news from what's going on back home.
But we'd pick up the occasional English newspaper in Addis, and there was stuff about the pandemic there.
And we thought when we came back, Oh, I wonder what's going on and came back in February and found, you know, a lot of talk about what was going on.
But my early knowledge of it was very, very vague because I was out of circulation.
Mm hmm. And then things clearly built up, and Mum was aware of trouble coming.
Mm hmm. So at what point did you decide to kind of throw yourself into the fray again?
Well, it was very strange.
We were already in lockdown in March, and we and during that time, one could go out for a walk in the park, the whatever it was, of exercise.
So I was walking from uni parks the way lots of people were and bumped into quite by chance.
An old friend of mine, David Mant, who had been professor of general practice here,
was also retired and the university asked him to set up a COVID service for the university.
And we just chatted in the park. What are you doing?
I'm all right. And he told me about this, and I said, Oh, that sounds interesting, David.
Well, give me a ring if you want a hand. And thought no more of it.
And later on, the same walk, I bumped into another friend who'd been a director of public health in Berkshire, Gene Bradlow.
One bumps into a very high one of those days.
Everybody was walking in the park. I was with my daughter in law and a baby and all that kind of thing.
And I told Gene about it, too. Guess what? I've just met David and what he's doing.
And then a couple of days later, the phone rang and it was David Mande.
And he said, Liz, you know this project I'm sending it setting up.
And, you know, you said you might lend me a hand. Well, how about. So that's how it all started.
Hmm. And he described to me what he was going to do and said, did I want to join in a paid capacity?
Because he was paid to do this and it was hard work. And I said, no, I don't want to do anything paid, but I'll join you as a volunteer.
And what could I do for you? And what really I was a small part of the service in that they wanted to set up what was called a
result liaison team so students would have there would be separate testing services for students.
The swabs were processed at the job lab.
We would get the results very quickly.
The whole idea was to get things through quickly, more quickly than the National Service, which was very slow at that time.
It took two or three days to get your result back. We would have a quick turnaround of results.
It would be fed straight to us as well as to the students,
and we would then be aware of what was going on in each college and help them sort things out.
And was it was called an early alert. So it was called an early alert service.
And that was why I got that name. And what he said was, could I find some some suitable people to set up a little team?
Where would we receive the results? And initially we would ring any student who had a positive result, talk to them about what they needed to do,
and talk to the college and talk to the department about what they needed to do.
So in a very non-PC way, we didn't advertise for people at all.
I ran round barriers with my friends who were mostly retired GP's or practice nurses,
and Gene who had been in public health and said, Would you like to do this with me?
And we ended up with 12 of us. I think it was all people who were retired but good friends of mine and basically people I knew I could work with.
And that really made it work. Well, we were we were good friends and we worked together as a team.
And and initially, I mean, we were making it up as we went along, really.
We got the result. So there was a website, we got the results, we phoned students and talked to them about what they should do.
And at that stage that was the beginning. We piloted it in the summer vacation of 2020 and really got going at the Michaelmas term when the
students came back because they'd been off during the the Trinity ten and started going then properly.
And did you work out a protocol for what you would say?
Yes, we did. But and we worked it out as we went along because, okay, there was government guidance, but it didn't cover every eventuality.
So you had to keep on saying, well, what do we do about this one? What do we do about that one?
And we developed a kind of in-house series of notes about, well, if this, then do that.
You know, that's exactly the kind of thing that I think the body would like to have.
Okay. Yes, I've still got it on paper.
Yes, yes, yes. And what happened was the university set up a system whereby each college and each department has what's called a Spock,
a specific perf single point to pursue the point of contact.
That's right. This box became very, very important. They knew very little about it at the beginning.
And learned very quickly. And who did they tend to be?
They were either domestic bosses or people within the bursar's system, or sometimes they were college porters,
the head porter, and in departments they would be reasonably high up in the administrative system of that department.
So there were a lot of them. And during the summer vacation, we drew up sort of protocols for colleges and departments.
And I was involved with that. And they were very lengthy documents.
They had to be, but they were little bit unmanageable.
You know, if you wanted to look something up, you had to wade through a lot of stuff to find it.
As with the government guidance, actually terribly difficult to wade through when you were trying to deal with a particular problem.
And I suppose for our team, as doctors and nurses who'd been involved in clinical practice, we were used to having to have advice available quickly.
You know, what do I do about this? I need to find somewhere quickly where I know what to do about it, not wade through pages and pages.
And that's what we were trying to provide. And as I say, at first, when students trickle back in Michaelmas term, fine.
We got positives. We rang them, we talked to them.
There was a lot of anxiety then, huge amount of anxiety, and a lot of what we were doing was calming people down,
telling them they were doing the right thing or that they weren't doing the right thing.
So I though I remember the first students I rang, the very first one,
I think the system was that they had an email telling them of their result and we could look up as well as at the same time.
So I rang him, said who I was at.
He would knew he'd just had a positive result and I was ringing him about that and I could hear noises in the background.
He must have had his results a little while ago, and he must have had symptoms in order to go and get tested.
And you were supposed, if you had symptoms, to isolate.
He clearly wasn't isolating. There were all kinds of noises in the background and his first question.
So I said, Well, where are you? He said, Well, I'm in the pub and what should I do now?
So I said, Well, the first thing you should do is go home away from the pub and you must tell
all your friends what the situation is because you have to tell your contacts.
But it was it was, you know,
it was indicative of the whole thing that there was somebody with symptoms had strong enough symptoms to go and get tested,
but he'd gone to the pub in it and that's what you do when you're 18, you know, quite often.
But many people actually were very,
very worried about obeying regulations and concerned both for themselves and for the community at large that they were doing the right thing.
So most people actually were very co-operative and wanted to be co-operative,
but there was the whole range of behaviour amongst the students and what kind of anxieties did they express and then what,
what advice would you give them about how to they were anxious about what, how it would be to be isolated.
You know, when you're 18, being on your own isn't something you're terribly used to and it's not what you've come to university for.
How would it work? So we were, first of all, reassuring them that the college would look after them and the colleges were wonderful.
I mean, when you compare this to students in other universities, the students in Oxford would just so well looked after.
It was like being at home.
The colleges saw it as their duty to make sure that anybody who was isolating had contact with the welfare officer had food.
You know, they clocked into that every day and said, Are you all right?
I mean, they really were as far as I could see.
I mean, I'm sure it wasn't always like that, but most of them were very, very good at looking after these students.
The students, you know, didn't want to be on their own. They were away from home for the first time in this strange place.
Suddenly they were on their own in this strange place. And it was those anxieties, not so much about being ill.
People were a bit worried about being ill, but it wasn't so much that it was more about How do I cope with the next ten days or 14 days,
as it was at the time of being on my own? And there were many of them from overseas?
Yes, they were. And.
And that posed additional difficulties of not having a feeling that their own family was further away.
I mean, these days, you know, with Zoom and so on,
you were just as much in contact with your family if they were in him Kong as if they were in Manchester.
In a way they weren't more isolated, but they felt they were in a foreign country and then they were on their own in a foreign country.
So it was about people's feelings about being on their own.
The other. The other difficulty,
I suppose we came across a hurdle we had to overcome was not only was the delay in the national system of being told your result,
there was delay, a lot of delay in test in the national test and trace service.
So your contacts didn't know that you were positive until several days later.
And of course, public health wise, that's a disaster. It really was a disaster.
It was very inefficient. And what we were keen to do was to do contact tracing as quickly as possible,
because particularly where people are living in very close quarters, which they are in colleges.
I mean, it's like being in a in a prison, isn't it, or in a boarding school.
You're living on top of one another. You've got lots of contacts who who were there.
And we didn't want to wait for the test and trace service to get in touch with them.
We wanted to do our own contact tracing. Now, legally, we didn't have the legal right to say you must isolate,
and we didn't actually have the legal right to say to the students, You must tell me the name of your contacts.
So it all had to be done by persuasion. So we had to persuade the students to get in touch with their own contacts and say to them, I am positive.
You need to isolate. And quite often students didn't want to do that.
And there were the usual complications of, well, actually, who did I spend the night with?
His stuff. Um, so my background was in family planning, so I was quite used to that.
Um, okay. You know, I was used to the way students socialised, shall we say, and the complications of that.
And they felt bad often about being, as it were, an index case and having 20 people they had to tell.
And those people would then have to isolate, you know, it would then have severe repercussions on the social life of all their friends.
So they're not supposed to be social distancing? Oh, yeah, sort of.
But there's a distance difference, you know?
The realities of life are different, aren't they? Put it that way.
So quite a lot of it was persuading people.
To do what needed to be done and make the team that we had were very good at that
because they'd all they weren't because they'd been GP's rather than hospital doctors.
They were used to negotiating with patients. Now hospital doctor tends to tell patients what to do.
A GP is more in a negotiating line very often, particularly the nurses.
And so they were very they and I chose people actually who I knew would be good at talking to people.
You need to be easy to be sympathetic. Straight forward and to be able to persuade people to do what you wanted them to do.
And that's what we did. And then what happened was in about October, the numbers suddenly increased hugely.
I mean, it was a huge expansion.
And instead of getting five or six people a day, we would get 20 people a day who were positive and we were on a rota,
you know, the team, we weren't all working full time. We would do a day each.
And some of them were married couples, and they'd do a day between them. And but we couldn't cope with the numbers.
We just couldn't get hold of them. You know, you had to ring the student.
So when they when they had the test done, they gave their mobile number.
Then you had to get hold of them, what, half the time they were asleep or they didn't want to answer their phones.
So you were ringing several times.
It was a bit of a nightmare getting hold of people and we realised then that we just couldn't cope with ringing all the students
and decided very quickly it was a decision that was made really over a day that what we would have to do is to ask the spox,
the single point of contact in the college to ring the students.
They would have to ring the students and talk to the students about contact tracing, and we would be there to support the sparks.
So our role changed very quickly during that October from talking directly to students to talking to Sparks.
We talked to some of the students. If there were complications, if it was a difficult one,
or if the sparks felt they needed to talk to somebody else who knew more about it, then we would talk to them before that point.
Well, they were discovering their roles. I mean,
I think their roles actually before had been and it was a big job to coordinate the services in
the colleges and in the departments more in the in the colleges where they had to coordinate,
where with these people live when they were isolating, who would bring them their food.
Did the welfare people know they needed to check in with them?
That sort of practical organisation of stuff was was a lot to do that huge burden to them and, and they had to get their head round that quickly.
And then when we said to them, and by the way, now we think you ought to ring all the students yourselves.
Some of them said, Oh my God, I can't do that. And some of them said, and eventually all of them said, actually, it's more appropriate.
We do that because we know them, we know them, we know where they live.
We know the geographical distribution of rooms and what you know.
The whole question was, are they in a household? What is a household?
Because you're all your household have to isolate within a college.
What is a house or is it a staircase if actually you don't share a kitchen and a sitting room, but you're on the same staircase?
Are all the other 20 people on that staircase in the household?
Do they all have to isolate? And of course, they knew how things were set up in a college.
And it was much, much better that they did all the negotiating with students.
So after their initial shock of having to take this on, they did it and they did it very well.
But they needed support from us. And actually, the easiest thing is to look at that book we drew up of what what should be done,
because that'll show you what kind of question they asked us. You know, can colleges gardens be used by students who are isolating?
Because when you're isolating, you are allowed to use a private open space.
Now, some colleges would have a part of a garden that college grounds which they could set aside, and only the isolating people could use it.
Fair enough. But in order to get to there, they would have to walk down corridors,
which were public spaces, you know, teasing out all that kind of very practical stuff.
Was that what we. And they had to do between us? So our main dealings were with colleges.
The departments had already organised themselves into distanced learning, so there wasn't so much to do with the departments.
But again, there were things to do with labs and ventilation and was it adequate and where are we seeing transmission of infection at work?
In other words, when staff were involved because it wasn't just the students, it was the staff as well.
So if staff became infected and then another member of staff in the same office was infected on the same lab.
Legally, this is transmission of infection at work and has to be reported to the health and safety at work people and so on and so on.
And so there were sort of ramifications.
The other group of people, because in colleges I'm talking mainly about undergraduates because most of the colleges are predominantly undergraduate.
Of course, there are postgraduate colleges. But there are also a lot of postgraduates who live out of college, either in university buildings,
in the university, you know, postgraduate accommodation buildings.
And we had quite a lot of dealings with them as well as to what was a household there, but also living in private accommodation.
And. Postgraduates have a more distant relationship with their college.
The college doesn't feel quite so maternal, as it were, to the postgraduates.
They're older, they're not on college premises. It's a very different relationship and a lot of the more of the postgraduates I think,
are overseas students and therefore were more, as it were, at sea about what do we do in this foreign country?
In a way, they were living like anybody else in the general population, so should have been following the rules we were all following.
But often weren't familiar with those rules.
And the college had a duty to make them familiar with those rules, but weren't so involved.
So. And there was, I think, more of a problem with postgraduates initially,
but within this box was still because they were still supposed to be dealing with them.
And they did. But more at a distance necessarily.
Actually, I'm interested. It's just something I've noticed that people don't use the phone nearly as much as they used to.
They work off an email or a. Yes, some other kind of messaging system.
Yes. I'm interested in how you came to decide that the telephone was going to be the main.
Yes. That you would use, because we felt that people wouldn't be reading emails and we wanted to get through them to quickly.
And I mean, the spox did they set up email systems, you know, they would get a result that was positive.
The results went automatically to colleges and departments.
They would get a positive result that would trigger an email immediately from the college to the student saying, You must do this and this and this.
But the student would then, you know,
get an email from the national system and they would get all kinds of emails from their parents once they said they were positive.
And people don't always read their emails and you don't know if they've read that emails.
And because I mean, this was really a public health exercise.
How do you try and stop spread effectively?
And the only way really in the kind of way people are living in colleges is to get through to them very quickly.
And the only way you can be sure you do that is by phone. And so.
We started initially by phone, and then this box would do that as well.
They would do it by phone and sometimes what they did.
I don't know whether you spoke to any of the sparks, but sometimes they would get because their job then became very busy talking to all these tutors.
So you'd have a household, you know, a staircase would be delineated as a household before term started.
Each college had delineated their households.
This is what we are going to call our households.
And students knew that. So they knew if Student A was positive in this particular household,
they had to get in touch with 20 people and sometimes they do a Zoom conference with those 20 people rather than talk to them individually.
And that,
I think worked quite well and it was good because people could voice their problems and difficulties altogether and they could deal with that.
And there were times when students rebelled and said, you know, why have I got to isolate?
And sometimes Spock's had to really bring in the head of house to talk to them and remind
them that they had signed a student contract when they signed up with the university,
which had things in it about being. Being careful about and considerate, giving consideration to your relationships with other people in your college.
You know, they didn't have legal control over people, but they did have strong moral control over people.
There were also students who wanted to go home either because they felt unwell or because usually because they were anxious.
Or because they had some other medical condition,
which meant that they were more at risk if they did become infected and someone in
their household was infected and they wanted to go home and be away from all that,
and we had to tease out what could they go home, you know, and legally you weren't supposed to move if you were.
So if you're a case or if you were contact, have lateral flow tests.
And we didn't know. We didn't know along with all lateral flow tests.
But there were instances where it was clearly medically justifiable to say, you can go home,
but this has to be arranged with your parents that they come, they collect you, you don't go on public transport.
You don't stop on the way back home and have a cup of coffee in a service station and you go straight from college to home.
Your parents know exactly what the situation is. You haven't got an old granny living at home who's vulnerable as well.
It took quite a bit of negotiating for people who needed to go home.
We as volunteers, although we'd all been doctors and nurses because we'd retired, we weren't insured anymore medically.
So we had a sort of vicarious insurance through the university, but we couldn't really act as doctors.
So we had. Doctors who David meant.
And there were two other doctors, Chris Conlon and Susan Donaghy, who are both infectious diseases consultants.
Very, very good, very experienced.
And if ever there was a situation where either we didn't know what to do or we felt actually needed to be a registered doctor who said what to do,
we would be in touch with them. So. They were very busy in dealing with wider policy issues and what we were doing was dealing with the basic stuff,
but referring to them when we needed to, and we would have regular meetings with them as well and look to them for guidance on all kinds of things.
So there was and they were very good there was a good dialogue between all us as a team and then in a way we were acting as their juniors,
but because they knew we were we had been quite experienced doctors in our own right.
We were we were colleagues and it was a nice relationship with them.
It's one of the nicest teams I've ever worked with, actually,
and that was a question I was going to ask about whether you felt that the the kind of like, well,
university wide, but also national imperative to cope with this and this disease as best as
possible and prevent it spreading and encouraged by a degree of collaboration.
Oh, yes, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, between us, it was easy because we were that kind, you know?
I guess I. It's awful, actually. You ought to advertise it, would you, for a job.
So we didn't advertise. I just ask people I knew I could work with.
You know, they were going in and there wasn't any equal opportunities about this.
Anyway, it worked.
But where it was noticeable that it in that it encouraged collaboration in a situation where there isn't always collaboration with between colleges.
Colleges are well known for competing with each other in all kinds of ways.
And, you know, we do it like this is a johns and we like do it like this is andamans.
And we have our own identity and we always have for the last thousand years, as it were.
And you saw a degree of collaboration here that I have not seen in the university before.
I mean, I've had bits and pieces to do with the university, and I was a student here.
So I know a bit how colleges feel about each other, and it was quite remarkable.
And I think it was because, you know, in in face of a common foe, you pull together and everybody was worried about it, very worried.
You know, it's not like it is now where COVID is a relatively minor disease at the moment.
Then there were a lot of people dying. There were a lot of people in intensive care.
Everybody was very worried and they pulled together quite remarkably itself.
So what what kinds of things were they collaborating on that? There was there was there was no rebellion about sticking to a common protocol.
We had, you know, and I remember even one meeting that we would have meetings on Zoom where all the college sparks
would come together on a Zoom meeting and we'd talk about what was going on and common problems.
And there were situations where we didn't people didn't know what to do.
And there was debate about what should be done.
And somebody said, because, again, there was there was much more collaboration between the colleges and the university that there usually is.
I mean, there's usually a bit of a tension, shall we say, between the university and the colleges.
And where does power lie and who's got the money and who's going to tell who to do what?
There's a healthy dialogue, we could say, but I very well remember one of these meetings,
somebody saying, quite senior, well, the university needs to tell us what to do.
And that is actually quite unusual.
So that sort of encapsulates the fact that people did want to cooperate, cooperate, and they realised that if colleges do different things,
there was a danger of students playing one off against the other because students, as it were at Somerville,
would know what the students at St Johns were doing and if they were doing something St Johns was saying something different,
they would go to their smock and say, Well, they're doing this in St John's, why can't we do it like this at Somerville?
So it was in the college's interests that everybody did the same because there was a certain amount of.
There was a certain amount of rebellion amongst the students and there was anxiety amongst the
colleges that students would play one college off against another if they did things differently.
So there was self-interest in doing the same thing,
and there was a genuine we don't know what to do when we need to get advice on the advice we get is what we'll stick to.
It was quite remarkable, actually, from what I saw.
I mean, I don't know how it felt from a college perspective, but it it looked quite impressive the way they collaborated.
Yeah. So how did things continue during 2021?
So we had a we had a spike over the winter. Yes.
It's too hard to remember what happened when in 2021, a kind of bit of a blur.
It's just you remember we had us like there was a I mean, things got more manageable.
People were dying quite so much. People were getting used to it.
The colleges and departments were getting used to how to run things.
So the anxiety levels decreased and the colleges were and departments were very
impressive the way they picked up this is what we do and the way they could.
They manage to cope with things. And then there were, you know, things are easier and then it got worse again.
There was a lot of debate about going home at the end of term,
what should be done about going home and testing before you went home, particularly if you were going?
If you came as a foreign students that that was the difficulty.
Then during 2021 people wanted to go home during the vacation and there were a lot of regulations
that were different in different countries about what tests you had to have before you travelled.
And not only different countries but different airlines. And so a lot of the overseas students.
Had real problems about. Whether they could go home and ended up staying here for a long time because it was a big hassle to go home.
And if they went home, would they be able to get back again? And that I think I remember one of the heads of college saying to me,
I've got a student here and overseas student here who's been here for two years and she's really missing her family because,
you know, she had thought the deal was when she came here.
She'd be going back, certainly in the long vacations, but maybe other locations, too.
So. And was that something that your group were involved?
We were involved in trying to help help students sort out what they had to do, those students, what they had to do before they went home.
But often, actually, it was a matter of telling them they had to find out what their individual regulations were in their individual country,
with their individual airline, and sometimes writing letters to say, this person had this test on this particular day,
which is what the medics, you know, Chris Conlon and David Mount and so on could do for them.
So they could get. So they they got I mean, all the tests we did were PCR tests.
All of them were they were all PCR tests at the beginning. All PCR.
Yes. Yes. I mean, when did the lefties come in and you know, I can't remember either.
But for a long time it was. And for a long time, I mean, until quite late in 2021, you had to have a PCR test to travel.
Lefties weren't enough. Yeah. So it was all PCR tests.
And one of the problems was that. Because our tests were being done at the John Radcliffe and not by the National Testing Service.
The results didn't always go on to the national system and therefore you didn't.
They weren't necessarily registered on the NHS app, right?
So if you needed something on your NHS app to tell you that you could go to a nightclub in France, it wasn't that kind of thing.
So those kinds of things need needed ironing out in terms of letters or, you know, us saying,
well, actually this person did have a test, it was positive and by now they're okay.
So there were administrative things of that kind to do.
And things gradually got easier as people got used to it.
And as people, things got more every day.
You know, we got used to doing things. And then as regulations eased during.
The latter half of last year, things got a lot easier, and now we're not doing anything.
We're going to stop now because the testing is stopping or national testing is stopping.
So there's no point doing testing here. When are you going to stop?
At the end of this term? 25th of March. That the PCR testing will stop.
But colleges, students, everybody,
the general public has been much more reliant on Lefty's for the last six months and therefore the demand for PCR has gone down terribly.
I mean, if you want figures on what the.
University did in terms of testing, those are available. I mean, there's this.
I can tell you who to get this from. And it's quite interesting.
And what was really interesting, actually, when Omicron came up so this was December 20 to 21 to.
One because we were doing our own testing, we were typing all the swabs.
So nationally they were only typing a certain percentage of the swabs.
We got the lab to type all the swabs and there's a wonderful graph which you ought to get actually it in during December and late November,
early December, where there's a bar chart showing positive tests.
And so blue was Delta, an orange was Omicron.
And over two weeks you can see the balance between the blue on the chart and the orange on the chart.
Just change. And it was absolutely.
A clear takeover of Omicron from Delta in a defined population,
which actually nationally they didn't have because they only sampled a certain
percentage and they didn't get on to sub two typing them quickly when we did.
So it was a very good demonstration of a local population and the change in the in the variant, in the dominant variant.
It was also very interesting at that stage how to see how infectious Omicron it suddenly became, because we were aware of,
you know, you'd have one case in a college and then a few days later you'd have a few more cases.
With Omnicom, you'd have one case in a college, and then two days later, you'd have ten more cases.
And I mean, it spread like like chickenpox, you know, you just could see it happening.
And it was right at the end of that Michaelmas term, and the colleges were having dinners.
To celebrate. I remember there was a law is the law department had a dinner and, you know, everybody got it.
You know, you just you could you could see it happening. And.
One of the problems the university and colleges and departments had to deal with was.
Things were opening up. How soon do you say, actually, we won't have these dinners?
Actually, we will tell people they can't have their parties and.
And. There was it was the same in the summer term actually of 2021 when there were end of term parties.
We had Freedom Day. We had Freedom Day and we had felt a number of us.
It was opening up a bit quickly and particularly we were saying opening up quickly in a in the kind of
community we have in colleges it'll spread don't have or be be careful about end of term parties people.
And I felt this very strongly people students will be having end of term parties.
It was suddenly Freedom Day. They will be mixing and then going home.
If you want to spread a virus, you let people mix and then they travel.
And this is what was was going to happen. And.
I remember saying that quite firmly at a meeting, and the university was a bit reluctant to say, Gee, chaps, hang on with these parties.
Be careful. I think the university as an organisation feels.
Finds it difficult to say something different from government guidance.
That's been apparent now as well.
And they think they understandable reasons would find it difficult to say something other than what is official government guidance, even though.
Public health wise, there would be justification for saying in a very small community, this is not the general public.
We are living differently. Maybe we should be a bit more careful, particularly in review of travel back home to where people are vulnerable.
But the university didn't want to do that.
And it took a while, like a week or ten days before the colleges suddenly started at the end of the summer term,
saying, oh, well, perhaps we won't have a dinner, perhaps we won't do this.
It took a while for the message to get through.
And then it was informally through meetings rather than formally through the university.
And I think that was a weakness. I think there are two things that were really important moments.
Okay. Yes. That this is very much my personal opinion.
But there were two ways in which I found a.
Difficulties in dealing with the situation in the university from a public health perspective.
One was this reluctance to say we are different from the general population and therefore sometimes we need to do things a bit differently.
We need to be more careful because there's more risk of spread. And the second is sometimes in decision making, it was a bit slow.
So as medics. Okay.
Evidence based medicine and all that, you look at all the evidence and you make decisions based on the best evidence you have,
but you're used to having very imperfect evidence,
and you're also used to emergencies and sometimes having to make a decision very quickly on imperfect evidence and having to go with,
I suppose, what you would call gut reaction or you could call, you know, experience.
If you've been around for a while, you kind of know this is probably the best thing to do.
Now within the university, academics are.
By their nature, of course, used to considering all the arguments of having a seminar of 2 hours,
taking all the views, thinking it over, and then having another seminar a week later to discuss it a little bit more.
And then somebody will write a paper and then we'll come out with some kind of view.
That's the way things move in academic circles.
And it's a different it's a different mindset when it comes to decision making.
I'm not saying the university can't make decisions, but.
Sometimes I think we as medics would trying to push them to make it more quickly, actually.
And there are times in an epidemic where you do need to get on with things more quickly.
And it was a little bit frustrating to have to wait for next week's meeting.
So when you talk about the university, what body was it?
The university set up a decision making system.
Um, I mean, the registrar was involved, was really the key person.
Um, and I mean, I don't know actually who was in there was a bronze group and a silver group and there was H Mag,
which was the medical advisory group.
So there were, you know, as in any organisation, a series, a hierarchy of decision making,
and sometimes decisions could be made at one level and sometimes they had to move up the levels.
I wasn't involved in that. I mean, Chris Conlon and is the person you need to talk to about that and or David.
But in. I think.
At some point when if we know the university is going to talk about, you know, lessons to be learned, if then if things go wrong again,
there is something about decision making quickly, which I think might be worth thinking about, actually.
And it got better as it went along, as we people began to trust each other more and work together more and said,
Well, if so-and-so says so, we better do it kind of thing.
I mean this was not at my level, is it? Chris Conlon and so on.
And. Yeah.
Mm hmm. Mm hmm. So how were you personally impacted by the by the the pandemic?
Did you I mean, for example, were you. Did you ever feel personally vulnerable relative to the infection?
Well, yes. But, you know, I'm over 75. And of course, I did.
You know, old people my age were told we were vulnerable.
And, yes, we knew we were. I mean, I'm luckily physically healthy and but I was being careful.
And I suppose, you know, as I was telling other people to do things, I felt I ought to do them myself.
But I was not by nature inclined to do that because I knew it was a serious illness.
And I had a son who's a doctor who was working in the jail on a COVID ward.
So I knew about people being really ill and dying and, you know, what was going on and.
So we were all worried at that stage.
I think if you weren't worried, you were in denial, really.
But some people were more worried than others. I didn't go to extremes, but I was, I should think, on the cautious side of things.
And it was very interesting and useful to be involved with this service because the people I was talking with
and working with Chris Communards and Susie Dennehy and David Manns at that stage really were in the know.
They had fingers in lots of pies nationally. They knew what was going on.
They were all people whose judgement I very much respected.
You know, they because people had different views nationally, I mean, very eminent people had different views.
But those three were people whose judgement I would trust.
And it was it was also useful personally to be in contact with them and to be discussing what was going on nationally as we did.
And so it was. Both interesting and useful to be involved and.
And personally also at a time when you know.
There was so little you could do, you know, you couldn't go to the cinema and you couldn't go to the theatre and you couldn't see your friends.
So actually to be involved with something was very it was very nice, too.
It gave you something to focus on and something you felt was vaguely useful to do.
So, yes, absolutely it did.
Absolutely. No, it was very good.
To have it then. It has been all the way along, actually.
You know, then I would find friends would ring me and say, Liz, you know about these things, you're involved.
What should I do? And so that was that was useful, too.
And sometimes it was useful in helping people to maintain a sense of proportion because some people became more anxious than they needed to be.
But also some people amongst friends, as well as in the university, were more gung ho than they should be.
And it was quite useful to be able to say, Look, actually, don't do that, you know, it's irresponsible, you know?
So personally, I it was both. Interesting and.
And useful. Yeah. And did you. Were you doing a little bit from home?
Yeah. Yes. So you were a team? Yeah. We all worked from home, didn't see each other.
You were just we did not see presumably other than on as eloquently.
Did you have half? Oh, once a week.
Once a week, certainly once a week. And at times more often at the beginning, when it was difficult, it would be more often and.
So once a week we would have a meeting as a team, as a results on team, and then once a week,
Gene Bradlow, who I mentioned, who was also it was a public jean and I were the only public health people.
The others were all GP. So we knew about public health and they learned about public health from us.
But Jean and I would have a meeting with the medics with,
with Chris Conlon and David and Susie once a week as well to sort of sort out what we were doing.
So that's what you would call the results. We would call the results liaison team.
Yes. Yes. That was within the RLT and the rest of the early service was the testing side of it was
was that was the whole thing earlier that was heavy was the testing and the follow up.
So we were subset of early, early alert, right? We were that part of it.
And then there was a big job in the testing. Which was, um, you know, getting people to do the testing.
So they had to find, they had to use medical students, um, and they had to train the medical students.
And then there were also nurses. And there were two GP's who were very involved in setting that up in the testing service.
And initially there were two sites, one at the Radcliffe, the old Radcliffe, and one up at the Churchill.
And then latterly when the number of tests were reduced, it was just at the at the Radcliffe and then there was the IT site.
I mean, they had to set up the whole light system and that was complicated.
So there was a lot of setting up to do.
But it's I mean, you said that you went through a few with the right person to talk to,
but I think it was the results themselves that I was interested in here.
So I think it's actually the right place. But they talked a bit about lessons.
I mean, all that positive lessons from that from from your experience of working on this as well as things that you'd like to see done better.
I think the, the positive lessons were how well people could work together as colleges and departments and.
That that really developed and I think would be something if something happened again one coulomb very quickly now.
And the other positive lesson I think is.
The way the college's bill and department is.
Well, actually how good they were at how responsible they felt actually, both for the students and for their staff.
I mean, departments, it was well and college it was the staff as much as students.
I mean, a lot of staff in colleges, for instance, come from at risk groups, you know, of of ethnic ethnic groups that were were more at risk.
People living in houses, multiple occupancy often.
And. The sort of care the positive lesson of of college is really being aware of how much of a family they were, which they've always had.
But this really pulled them together as a family and of a need to look after not just the students, but their staff as well.
And I think that that was people who did get the sense people were pulling together.
Mm hmm. Which was good. Yeah. And are you happy to be stepping back from it now, or would you like to find something else to do that?
It's fun. I'm happy to step back from it now. And we've said, okay, you know, if things go wrong, you can ring this again, we'll do it again.
But no, it's it's fine. It's okay.
But it was certainly very useful as occupational therapy during lockdown.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, that's fantastic.
Thank you very much.