Okay. Could you start by saying your name and your current job title?
So I'm Christopher Price and I'm the divisional registrar and chief operating officer of Medical Sciences within the University of Oxford.
That's great. And going back to your very first thoughts about a career in subjects of interest.
Can you just give me the main kind of headlines in your in your life up till up till up till the end of 2019,
which is when we're going to start talking about code? So I started sort of working at the university accidentally in 1993.
I didn't really intend to have a career in the university.
I took on a temporary job to earn some money to go around the world, and I still haven't gone round the world because I.
What have you done before that? What what degree did you do?
I my degree is in sociology, which is something I don't share often with my medical sciences colleagues.
But yeah, I have a degree in sociology, and my first job after leaving university was a kind of clerical job in the university,
and I basically worked in the Central University for a couple of years and then started working with Sir Richard Peto.
And so what we call him in the clinical trial service unit when they were based on the Radcliffe Infirmary,
And I pretty much stayed in medical sciences,
progressing through professional services roles over the last 20 years until at the end of 2019,
I was in the Divisional Registrar of Medical Sciences. Hmm.
And I assume that wasn't just inertia. He did actually discover that it was a career path that had a lot of interest.
Yeah, I mean, I said slightly bizarrely.
So when I had done my sociology degree,
my final year dissertation had been about risk and the perception of risk as it applied to different sort of socioeconomic classes.
And the subject matter that I picked for my kind of risk assessment was smoking.
And so a lot of my dissertation involved understanding issues today with smoking through the work of Richard Peto and Sir Richard Doll.
And so when this job opportunity came up in the unit in which they were both still working at that time,
Sir Richard and Sir Richard were both in the unit at that time.
I kind of decided that, you know,
working in a role which in an environment that was likely to do good for mankind was something that I really wanted to do.
And I seemed to have some aptitude for aspects of finance and administrative administration.
And so that ongoing combination of being quite good at what I do,
but also working in an environment where it makes a difference to people around the world,
that that's always been an important part of what I've done.
And at times I've considered taking on jobs in other parts of the university.
But I've always found medical sciences just so more kind of motivating in terms of seeing more
directly the good that it does than some of our other academic subjects in the university,
which is no disrespect to those areas of the university,
just for me that seeing people's health and lives brings hope is very palpable kind of reason to get up in the morning.
Mm hmm. And can you just give some idea of the scale of the Medical Sciences division at Oxford, the Medical Sciences Division?
It's got about 5 to 6000 staff.
The majority of those are based in Oxford, but we have a reasonable number of staff who are based in overseas programs in South East Asia and Africa.
We have about I think it's about 1500 students.
We have a relatively small number of undergraduate students.
We have the medical course of medical students, which is a relatively small medical course within the UK,
but we have a growing kind of population of postgraduate researchers doing dphil PhDs and an increasing number of postgraduate courses.
Our turnover is not very large, so I think that turnover of colleagues about £600 million a year.
And so if you took our research income, which is one of the entertaining facts,
if you took medical sciences research income and put it in a table of universities of the UK ranked in size by
research income Medical Sciences Division in Oxford would be something like the third biggest university in the UK.
So it's it's a large operation and you're not just responsible for the financial side of it.
Can you talk about scope? Give me some idea of the scope of your role as registrar?
Yeah. So the way the division kind of works is that it has an academic leader, the head of division,
which is Captain Screech and currently and he's been doing it since 2019.
And then the divisional registrar is basically responsible for all of the support functions, the professional services.
So that includes fairly standard support functions such as finance and h.R.
And I.T.
But we are responsible through the division, the office for making sure that we have enough space, that we have equipment and related infrastructure.
We have various kind of scientific services that support our academics.
We have infrastructure to support clinical trials.
And so that entire breadth of everything that you would need to do, which is quite a large breadth of medical sciences, falls under my responsibility.
Some of that is done directly by the team I lead.
We have a team of about 180 staff in the divisional office,
but a lot of it is done by professional service staff who are embedded in the division's 16 departments.
So it's it's a it's a very broad remit. And what's it like working with medically oriented academics and clinicians?
It's fantastic. So I spent in my career, I did spend one year working in the Central University,
and one of the things that I kind of noticed through that experience is that the medical clinical colleagues,
they don't really make much distinction between professional support staff and clinical staff and researchers.
They see us as one big team, all playing a pivotal role in pursuing the education and research that we're here to do.
And there's no sort of sense of eminence. We all have our hosts, we all have our expertise, and we work very collaboratively as a team.
And I think that stems, you know, with clinicians, a lot of them, you know, working in multidisciplinary teams, making decisions about patient care.
They're very used to working in that way.
And that that makes it a kind of a really rewarding environment working because your voice is heard and listened to, your views are respected.
So they are they are great people to work for, even if they are.
Sometimes they're hard to contact because they're so super busy, both being academics, but also,
you know, many of them being active clinicians in a doing ward rounds and on co-writers, etc.
And just before we get on to COVID, can you give me an example or a couple of examples of projects that you were involved
in up to 2019 that you're particularly proud of or were particularly challenging?
Yes, Yes, that's a good question. So. A lot of my time in the divisional office has been in support of objectives
that Sir John Bell has wanted to achieve during his time as Regis professor.
And they are broad. So a couple of examples of things that, you know, I kind of felt that we delivered well and were good things.
So one is that there's an institute in Oxford called the Kennedy Institute for Rheumatology, which is funded by a charitable trust.
And for a long time that institute existed as part of Imperial College in Hammersmith,
in London, And discussions between Oxford and the trust that funded it, you know,
reached a conclusion that its ambition and its endeavours would be really well supported better in Oxford than in Imperial
due to the sort of breadth of activities that were in Oxford and that were synergistic to what the Kennedy wanted to do.
So we basically undertook a project which was to build the Kennedy Institute home in Oxford.
But then during the period from deciding that that's what we were going to do to the doors of that institute, being able to be opened,
which was about a five year period, the Institute in London transferred from being run by Imperial College to being run by the University of Oxford.
So we ran this institute in London for about three years before then relocating the entire activity to Oxford.
And then that activity has really grown and flourished in Oxford.
So it felt like a very daunting kind of prospect. When John called me up one day to say, This is what I'd like you to do.
But but I think it's been super successful and the outputs of the Kennedy have really been enhanced by being in this different environment in Oxford.
Another kind of project, slightly different was that I think part of the sort of division strategy or
the way that the strategy has evolved a little bit over the last decade or
so is to become a bit more outward looking in terms of who our partners are
and the need for us to work hand-in-hand with industry and pharma companies.
So that the idea that, you know, we look at a very sort of small part of the pipeline from discovery science to,
you know, a drug having an impact on a patient population, you know, we are expanding our kind of role in that pipeline.
And so another project that John and I worked on was to build a relationship with the Danish
pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk to convince them that they're having a research centre in Oxford,
would be good for them and would be good for us.
And then building up a strategic alliance agreement with them, which included us, building them a home on the older campus in Headington in Oxford.
And we managed to do that. We managed to build them the home.
They made an initial investment in their Oxford centre over a five year period, I think of about £100 million.
And then they decided, I don't know six months ago that they were going to increase their investment in Oxford.
They're now looking for more space because they've outgrown their home.
So again, a kind of vision of if they could come here, we could work with them,
they would flourish, we would flourish in that space proved to be true.
So again, a project that was pretty complex involving lots of eating of pickled herring in Copenhagen has again delivered the goods over time.
So yeah, there are many, many others like that, but those are two kind of memorable.
Well, no, I think that's done a really good job of showing how your role encompasses money,
buildings, strategy, research, strategy, negotiating with a multitude of different parties.
So, yes, really complex task. So let's finally arrive at Coban.
Do you remember where you were? It's a question I'm asking everybody.
When you first heard that there was something going on in Wukan and how soon
it was before you realised that this was going to hit Oxford like a truck.
Yeah, it's a it's a great it's a great question. And it was going back to that comment about haziness of, of memory.
I was trying to kind of think through those first few weeks really, because they did all sort of blur into one.
So my own kind of personal recollection of the first time I can remember hearing about it was.
Literally on the news say that the fast emerging kind of stories about some corona virus novel corona virus outbreak in China.
I hadn't heard of Wuhan until that point. I just kind of remember hearing about it on the news, and that was probably probably in late December,
sort of Christmas new year, just through normal media.
And and I, I, I think it was probably in the first either the first week or the second week of January,
they started to be internal correspondence about this novel coronavirus outbreak in in China.
And that was coming from slightly different directions. So that my first kind of engagement really was from the scientists point of view.
So, you know, I remember I'm pretty sure the first email I got about it was from Professor Richard Holbrooke,
who is our professor of general practice.
He'd copied me into an email which had gone to folk in India and some of the people involved in like surveillance.
Peter Horby I think Adrian Hill and Helen McShane, because he, with the Vaccinologist just kind of asking,
you know, was there any, any kind of coordination of people who had an interest in novel COVID?
At that point in time and and I and I can remember not thinking that much about it at that point.
So, you know, from time to time things will happen in the world that have a kind of scientific interest to the university.
And at some point the division might get asked to do about coordinating of people in a
certain space and then the right people having the right conversations with each other.
So I didn't I didn't massively think much about it in that in that first fortnight in in January.
But it started to move quite quickly after that in terms of thought processes.
And Gavin Scruton is the head of division. He was an immunologist.
So Gavin, I think because of his expertise and knowledge,
it always felt like Gavin was about two weeks ahead of the university as a whole in thinking about what was likely to happen.
So I think in about the middle of January, I got to kind of Gavin's emails and they were much more than a sentence long.
I've got an email from Gavin saying we need to start planning for the prospect of an outbreak in
the UK and what would we do if we needed to shut down the division because of a COVID outbreak?
And I remember when I got that email, I can still remember my reaction to it now,
sort of thinking, Well, that sounds a bit ridiculous, like a bit of an overreaction.
But I kind of quickly learned that whenever Gavin sort of gave an assessment of what might happen next, it generally proved to be pretty accurate.
So the further comments that he made, I never did think were overreactions, I start to think that was likely what was what was going to happen.
So it was very, very early in January and it had that two prongs to it from my point of view.
So one was the scientists starting to think about how they could marshal their expertise and resource to help a scientific response to it.
And then there was in parallel to that, how we, like the rest of the university,
would cope if this turned out to be a very serious outbreak of a highly infectious virus.
So there were kind of two streams of work that started emerging in that and sort of about the middle of January of 2020.
And how did you respond to that? I mean, did you did you set up a task force or a working group?
So most only on the so on the scientific side, the main kind of coordination of the scientific community,
I think, in the end was really pushed by Richard Cornwall,
Professor Rich Cornwall, who's the head of the Nuffield Department of Medicine, and a series of I remember correctly,
they were daily meetings so that, you know,
8:00 every morning a group of senior scientists would be would meet to start thinking about what they needed in order to
be able to respond to a practical that would say their also like scientific meetings taking place that Richard convened.
But Richard also kind of created this group that comprised a number of the senior scientists, you know,
people like Cedric Abel and Dave Stewart and Gavin and Paul Clansman, Derek Crook, etc., etc.,
along with a couple of people from the division office, myself and Brett Cronin,
who's the head of Strategic Planning and Projects and senior professional support staff from the National Department of Medicine.
And the purpose of those meetings was what were the obstacles to the science that the professional support staff could sort out?
And so that sort of scientific program was being driven by the scientific group.
And then from a professional services perspective,
this early morning meeting every day was then kind of driving the agenda for the
professional support staff in the department and the division and the division
in particular to influence the university where the university needed to be
influence to help with the practicalities of the scientific scientific response.
And quite early on, a lot of that initial focus, probably during January, probably into February, about practical issues, focussed on money.
So I think a lot of.
You know, we kind of live in an environment where, you know, people are constrained by the budgets that they have available to them.
And initially, that mindset still existed so that we were still thinking, oh, well,
we need to like follow all of the rules and not take risks and act as as if this were a normal situation.
And and so that was quite a significant drive to identify money that could be directed from within the university to help with initial responses.
There was also a very significant drive around fundraising in those first few weeks in order to support the response.
So initially a lot of it was kind of focussed on finance,
but as time went by that changed and can come onto that from a from an operational point of view in in January,
we didn't really react to it very much at all. So, you know, so Gavin sort of raised these questions about, you know,
we need to plan about how we're going to respond, you know, were there to be a shutdown.
But the university response and of course,
the university did eventually take a coordinated response was and this is not a criticism, it was relatively slow to get going.
So they they convened a meeting of various representatives of academic divisions and services.
And I think the college's which was it didn't involve me, for example, it didn't involve the divisional registrar.
It involved people in less significant roles.
And that sort of met, I think, for a few weeks before.
I think people then realised that this was going to be a very serious issue.
And then the university's formal crisis management response protocol was put into place.
And then I went on to the Bronze Group, which at the start of that period of time was meeting, you know, two or three times a week.
But there was a sort of kind of practical operational response to how do we keep the university running.
The probably didn't really get going in earnest until well into February.
Once I think it became much clearer that the direction of travel was going to be of significance in terms of the ability of the university to operate.
So those those first couple of months were sort of slightly, slightly weird in that sense.
And when did all that start to crystallise?
Because I mean, the national lockdown didn't actually happen until the 23rd of March.
Yeah. The university had sent people home before that.
And so, so I was trying to remember the order of events and I don't think it was much before that.
So one of the things that my memory gets jogged by is because I took a lot of photographs, you know, on my phone and on a camera.
And so I went back and kind of looked through all of my photographs from February and March.
And so I know that I think it was only it was the 18th or 19th of March.
We made the decision. So the Medical Sciences Division office, our main office where I'm based,
and the senior team and Gavin is based, is in the middle of the John Ratcliffe Hospital.
And so the John Ratcliffe Hospital, probably in February,
I do remember getting an email saying that there are now two COVID positive patients in isolation in the John Ratcliffe,
which I think was at some point in February, it was on the 1918 19th of March that we decided that we were going to shut the office.
And so we were in the office working pretty normally.
We hadn't sent people home right up until the start of that lockdown.
We moved our office because I took a decision that it was likely that we would need to keep our
office open even if we did go into lockdown for a variety of reasons for some core activities.
So we moved our office from the John Ratcliffe or parts of our office from the John Ratcliffe over into a Victorian building on the old Road campus.
And I took that decision because I knew by that point when we were into March,
based on the scientific coordination meetings and the operational coordination meetings, that whatever happened,
we were going to have to keep significant parts of old road and facilities on the church hall open and operational in
order to support the response where the General Institute is based on our road and we weren't going to shut that down,
we would have to continue to operate it. So we didn't move.
So we didn't shut down our office and send people home until well into March.
And I think it was only a few. I think it really wasn't. It was only a few days after that.
I then remember going home one evening and then watching the announcement of that first lockdown.
But it was it was only just after we'd kind of made our own decision to shut the office and send people home.
Yes. Yes. No, I think that's right, because it was I spoke to someone else who was a student medical student at the time,
and they said they were actually sitting in their last lecture of term right when a buzz
started to go around the room and everybody was getting texts on their phone saying,
you've got to go home. Yeah. So yeah, I think that was it was that last week, the week before the formal government shutdown.
And what I can't remember is through three COVID.
We always had this challenge, but there was always this issue of the fact that we were operating in a life hospital, our offices in a life hospital.
And we do work closely. You know, we have strong relationships with the CEO and the executive directors of the Trust.
And so there was a degree of consciousness that as the hospital was sort of, you know, getting into increasingly challenging circumstances,
it did not make sense for non-critical activity to be, if you like, you know, complicating the operations of the hospital.
And we certainly had when we moved out of our office, we immediately offered our office to the trust to say, look,
if you need to use that office for anything, you know, for breakout space for we'll now clinical teams, you know, do what do what you want with it.
So we were kind of conscious because we were based in a hospital that we needed to act
slightly differently than if we'd been in an office block of the university somewhere else.
Right. So you have these two things running in parallel, supporting the scientists and deciding how to manage the that the professional
services side of the of the division or indeed the division as a as a whole.
Let's just go back and finish talking about the about the support for the scientists.
At first you brought up fundraising. How did that go and what was that?
What were your main targets, your main sources? Oh, so I think the say the fundraising around the COVID response, fundraising.
I suspect if you spoke to the head of Amnesty fundraising card in the area,
she might say it was kind of some of the almost like the easiest fundraising that they had to do,
because quite a lot of it was us being reactive to offers from people who wanted to assist.
We've we've Oxford's response some of those many of those being individuals or
organisations that had historically given money to Oxford fought for other things.
So what we what we and a lot of it was kind of quite a lot of small to medium donations,
you know, a few million pounds rather than, you know, nobody gave us £20 million.
They were sort of single digit numbers.
So in terms of, of millions and in some instances the money was given to support a particular individual's work.
So certainly like the I think the Vaccinologist Zeta and Sarah, you know,
sought to utilise connections that they already had to try and get some money
in so that they didn't feel that money was a constraint to their response.
And I think it's fair to say I don't think money ever really was a constraint to the response once it became clear how serious it was.
So that, you know,
I think the university underwrote all sorts of costs at risk rather than delaying certain steps on the pathway of developing the vaccine.
But some of the donations were much more kind of generic.
They were just money to support the COVID response. So we established what we called the COVID Research Response Fund.
So we basically took as much of the donation money that came in that was non-specific, put it into a fund,
and then very rapidly set up an internal bidding process across the university with a review group where people could say, well, you know,
we want to research into this element, we want to research into this, and people pay to create a very light, touch,
agile process because we didn't want a bureaucratic process to stop the money getting out to the scientists as quickly as possible.
And that that fund the board or whoever oversaw it, you know, met several times,
making multiple allocations to help specific research groups with specific elements of the response across a range of activities,
not just in medical science, because then the majority were in medical sciences.
Yes, I spoke to Patrick Grant about that. So, yes, I think he might have changed it.
So, yes, Yes. And it was it was kind of a great example of, you know,
one of the common features of the sort of COVID experience within the university was, you know,
the university pulling together as one entity with the traditional barriers between divisions
and departments becoming pretty invisible and the university acting with speed and agility.
And that fund was a great example of that.
Behind the scenes. It was it got, you know, super complex administratively,
which hopefully most of our scientists kind of never got involved in some of that because, you know,
trying to track these donations, trying to keep donors updated on what happened with their specific allocation of money,
etc., was quite a lot of work behind the scenes.
But we tried to keep that only visible to the scientists so that they were just getting on with the science.
So that was so money turned out to be not as much of an object as it might have been.
What were the other main challenges in terms of supporting the scientists?
So. I mean, of course, there were there were different elements to the scientific response.
So I would say, for example, that the recovery trial led by by Peter Obi and Martin Landry, kind of was pretty self-sufficient.
So obviously with the Nuffield Department of Population Health with its background in running clinical trials,
they had the expertise to get that trial up and running using many of their tried and tested methodologies and with support of the
very experienced research services teams who support making sure we do in clinical trials consistently with government guidelines.
So there wasn't a huge amount of kind of university divisional support around the recovery trial.
A lot of the issues kind of arose in supporting the vaccine elements of the response,
and that was I think that was for really sort of straightforward reason.
You know, it didn't feel straightforward at the time, but in hindsight I think it's clearer.
So, I mean, I'm sure you speak to people about, you know, how rapidly they make mistakes,
you know, came up with the notion of how they could create a vaccine.
The main path green and the clinical biomanufacturing team, you know, could start to manufacture in small doses.
But they were all always clear that they couldn't simply focus on getting a vaccine that worked,
trialling the vaccine to make sure it worked properly.
They had to, in parallel, start discussions about how this was going to be manufactured at scale, because if if this were to be done sequentially,
that would massively lengthen the response time of actually having a vaccine available at large scale for for many people.
So that meant venturing into a world, of course,
that the university doesn't really get involved in an institutional level of how do we get billions of doses of a vaccine manufactured?
And so.
That sort of novelty of trying to, I guess, support and keep pace with some of the academic leaders within the Jenna who were out there, you know,
negotiating with various manufacturing companies to get the capacity to start to manufacture a successful vaccine at some sort of scale,
you know, created some nervousness in the university, I guess, because, you know, that's not what we do.
We don't we don't manufacture vaccines. We don't enter into contracts with manufacturers of vaccines.
You know, generally we would seek to license the IP to a drug company.
You would go off and manufacture a vaccine if we went down that road.
So so a lot of the support,
I think from the kind of department through and divisional perspective was really just trying to keep track of what was going on and trying to,
you know, make sure that the university didn't get to risk averse and cautious and I
guess slow down some of the processes that needed to be taken forward at pace.
And that I think, was quite a messy space because it wasn't a conversation with just one manufacturer that, you know,
conversations with multiple manufacturers, some UK based, some based in Europe because no one manufacturer would have the capacity.
So there were multiple conversations going on. So one of the things we did in the end was that we got hold of somebody, Richard Levinsky,
who used to be head of research services for medical sciences for the university, who had recently retired from that role.
And we he's an expert in kind of, you know, all sorts of contracts understood the channel from having worked for the university.
And so we put him in that space to kind of work with people like Sandy Douglas
and Adrian Hill to kind of try and just keep track of what was going on,
kind of make sure there were no ridiculously big risks being taken that weren't feasible.
And, you know, I think at times that was slightly kind of fraught because I guess the scientists sort of were always ahead in understanding
the scale of the problem that was being faced and the scale of delivering a solution to help resolve that problem.
And everyone else is sort of playing catch up. And so that kind of being able to support the momentum or keep the momentum
going in an organisation that is traditionally quite risk averse was I think,
one of the roles that was played. They're also much more practical roles, you know, like not having enough space.
And as we kind of moved into lockdown and there were laws and guidelines about how you could work,
trying to make sure that we could facilitate the ongoing operations of these facilities that needed to keep working.
And and that included just silly little things. I mean, I can't even remember what the issue was.
But, you know, at some point there were regulations or laws where there were exemptions for critical workers or emergency workers as needed,
and that might include people delivering petrol in petrol tankers.
But the guidance would come out of the law would come out, and there would be no reference to scientists working on a vaccine response.
And so we would then be going back through the university because the university was extraordinarily well connected,
I think in the government at that point saying, you know, can we get this changed?
Can they change the guidance so that it's clear that if you're working on a vaccine response, that you know,
you don't need to worry about being stopped in your car by the police and being asked, why are you out driving on your way to work?
So there was a real range of stuff going on at that time. So, yeah.
And I talked to most of the people you mentioned.
So I've got it from the science side. But then, so would you say the dealing with the kind of operational side of the division, coping with the how,
how the division should respond to the pandemic itself and looking after its employees and a bank, all these regulations?
Was that a bigger part of what you had to do? It varied from from time to time.
So at certain points, I mean, not so much I guess, in that first half of the year, but things would arise in the scientific area.
There were real problems. So I think one of the things that has to be said is that the support offered to the
scientists by the professional support staff from the Nuffield Department of Medicine,
where a lot of the activities which are exceptional, I mean, you know, they dealt with so much stuff without having to,
you know, get things unlocked by the division or get things unlocked by by the university.
But occasionally, you know, something would arise that was either we needed to influence outside the university,
which they wouldn't be able to do as well as the division of the university,
or it would be something university policy would either would inadvertently become a roadblock to something.
And I would say that, you know, I kind of I went pretty religiously to these atrium meetings every day,
you know, for the first, I don't know, a couple of months. But as time went by,
I went less frequently because the number of things that needed to be resolved kind
of diminished in terms of stuff that couldn't be handled by by the by the department.
That's the university's response to police was it did consume a lot of time for for a variety of reasons.
So, I mean, obviously the university is a kind of big organisation with a sort of breadth of activity and
its its general position was whatever whatever the government said it needed to be done.
That's what the university would do. Now what I mean by that is not that they would ignore the guidelines.
I mean that they wouldn't go further.
So, you know, one of the things that was a feature of of COVID is a real diversity of views about what the university should and shouldn't be doing.
So some people thinking the university was being too draconian or too cautious,
and other people thinking that it should be much more risk averse and cautious than the guidance or the law at the time.
And so the university's response, a lot of it was implementing locally government policy.
And I suppose where I had a role to play was twofold.
So one was kind of influencing how the university implemented stuff with a particular eye on our ongoing operational needs,
because of course during phases of COVID,
we might have been the only part of the university that was actually active in doing anything because other
parts of the university had been shut down completely because they had no exemption or reason to be operating.
And therefore some of the policies that might be implemented had a risk of a factually
affecting what we were trying to do more than other parts of the university.
But also, I think part of it was then kind of locally trying to make sure that we were pragmatic
about how we implemented university policies in response to COVID so as to ensure that,
you know, we didn't create further obstacles for the science in there.
Certainly in the first year in 2020 per the science that was being undertaken.
And that yeah, that was time consuming. I mean that there was a lot of decisions being made about a lot of the thing, a lot of things.
Education, of course, took a lot of focus within the university because while medical science is is heavily research focussed,
a lot of the university has a much bigger focus on educating students.
And so a lot of the university's response was to do with the educational experience and what happens to students and to
apply to kind of less and less of an active role in them because of our student number profile being being smaller.
So there was that element of kind of affecting the university's response.
But then there were two other elements away from the science, and I guess it's worth talking about a bit.
So there was there was the support that the university was asked or offered to give outside the university.
So one of the things I really remember vividly during those first couple of months
in particular was the pressures that the I guess the NHS principally was under.
And part of that was, you know, their ability to operate.
You know, so I mean, I mean function and their inability, you know, through whatever the supply routes were to get things such as PPE,
you know, swabs, etc., that they needed in the local hospital to continue to treat patients.
So, you know, we spent quite a lot of time early on sourcing as much spare supply of PPE,
specific types of swabs for particular types of tests from across the university, getting it collected in vans,
taking it to our distribution centre in our grow to make it all available to the trust
because they just couldn't get hold of this stuff through standard procurement routes.
And so things that people would have had in labs around the university anyway as a lot of their normal
absolutely stores and stocks of their stuff that they might use over a few months or six months.
And the trust was desperately in need of some of this stuff.
And so, you know, we were regularly putting calls out, you know, it was so regular, you know,
we ended up creating a kind of online portal so that they could tell us what they needed and we could
get that out to our departments so that they knew what we wanted so that we could get it to them.
I mean, that that improved over time.
I think what, you know, once, you know, PPE and related supply issues became kind of know it as a big problem, they started to be resolved.
But in those first few months, there was never, you know, our offices, you know.
Just sort of boxes of kind of gowns and gloves and facemasks, etc., some of which, you know,
we had got donated to us so that because of the support of our kind of collaborators and donors,
we had, you know, collaborators from China sending us aeroplane loads of PPE to help the response in Oxford.
Yeah, I've got crazy photos of just folks upon box of Facemasks.
You know, and you know, some of that we kept on a lot of it. We supplied to the to the NHS.
There was also, I guess during March actually.
So I think probably before lockdown started the first lockdown, the government was trying to gear up its testing.
So initially the, you know, PCR based testing approach, not the lateral flow device testing.
And you know, they were creating what became known as these lighthouse labs and that was there
was one in Milton Keynes and certainly a number of scientists from across Oxford,
you know, went and worked in these labs, especially the Milton Keynes wasn't helping setting them up.
And the thing that they right early on they did not have is they didn't have any equipment.
So that. Q PCR machines that you put these Swope seem to test, they just didn't have enough machines.
And so one of my surrealist memories, surreal memories of COVID during that march was I was in I was at home in the bath,
and my phone rang and it was a guy called Andrew Gilligan, who I think is the Andrew Gilligan,
who I think he broke some of the stories around glass down for.
And I think at the time he was Boris Johnson, cycling tsar for the government, but they'd all been kind of pulled in in number ten into a response.
So he was ringing me from number ten because he'd been given my name saying, I hear you can get hold of PCR machines in Oxford.
We'll have a lorry or a van from the Army at Old Road at 7:00 tomorrow evening to pick up whatever you can get.
And I remember going down from my boss, I know I've been away and I just had, just had a friend call from the number ten.
I think this is quite serious.
And then, you know, we spent the next day getting hold of I think in the end it was about 17 of these PCR machines from, you know,
buildings right the way across Oxford, boxing them up and on the door at 7:00 the following evening in a hertz rent rental van.
Three soldiers arrived and took these machines away from them.
So went with them to Milton Keynes. There was an element of that kind of national response because we are a science corporation providing staff,
providing equipment, but also providing PPE and stuff to the trust.
So in those early months that that was quite, quite time consuming,
as well as trying to influence the university's response when it went completely bonkers, really for me was actually.
Must have been about July of 2020.
And. The university had set up as part of its kind of COVID response group, which I think it was called,
and it was called the Health Measures Group, and it was chaired by Professor Chris Coleman.
And the Health Measures Group had decided that because access to testing was not straightforward at that point in time,
it wasn't kind of freely available to everyone that we needed to set up an in-house
testing service within the university for COVID bed for staff and students.
And so that that decision was made, I think probably late June in 2020.
And the view was that we would need to get this testing service up, running in time for the students to return,
which in Oxford starts with medical students who return at the end of August.
And basically the university kind of turned to me and the Division of Medical Sciences to say,
Oh, we've decided we're going to set up a COVID testing service for staff and students.
Could you coordinate, not please, because, you know, you people are most likely to know how to do it.
And so that then kind of became pretty time consuming for.
Yeah, quite a long time, actually. I mean, I've lost track of the dates, but the sort of we that we spent in the summer.
I convened a team from across the university.
We appointed, like a project manager. Need I remember ringing you up one day to say, Oh, I've got this small job for you.
It won't take much time. And it probably consumed her life for six months.
And we we set up from scratch a Koby testing facility which had two pods inside.
That was one based on old growth, and there was one based at the old Radcliffe Infirmary, the centre of town.
We staffed with qualified nursing medical students,
supported in all of our laboratory testing eventually was done through the microbiology labs at the hospital,
so we had to create an I.T. system dedicated to taking all of the bookings of the individuals from across the university wanting to be tested,
managing the flow of the swabs up to the hospital, the tracking of the swabs, the results, getting the results back to the right people.
It was a huge project. And, you know, we just just get the name of the person you just mentioned whose life was consumed for six months.
Jo Jo Roe. So she I can't remember what she was doing for me at the time, but she used to work in medical sciences research services,
and she was working on a project for me in the division office and I can't remember what it was,
but I just said to her, said, Oh, yeah, could you, could you, could you take this on?
And it was a it was a fantastic I know of many people who weren't from that, despite the circumstances,
found a kind of fantastic experience because, you know, we went from nothing to a functioning service.
We opened, I think in August. I think we were slightly late and, you know, it had teething problems,
but it was hugely successful because what it did was it massively reduced the amount of time between somebody
deciding they need to have a test because they had symptoms and us in the university knowing the result.
So one of the critical parts was of it was that the result came back into the individual,
but it also went to the individual's college and it went to the individuals department who were then getting this test result,
sort of, you know, often within 24 hours where as the NHS NHS system could take two or three days and those 24
hours or 48 hours extra at that point in terms of the response to having a positive case,
in terms of isolating in a college,
the people in their household or the department informing people that someone who was a close contact had had COVID,
I think huge influence the university's ability to remain operational and respond to COVID cases.
So it bought us time and that time was used to respond most effectively.
We always hoped, I think when we started we thought, Well, we'll set this up and then and then, you know, it will settle down.
Then we'll have this functional service and we'll keep it going as as long as we need to.
But because there was always changes to the guidance and who could be tested on what basis it was is always being iterated.
And then to make it even more complicated, I think during the autumn of 2020.
So at that point, testing was all based on PCR testing swabs up your nose.
And then during the autumn, through partly the work of Derek Crookes lab, the John Ratcliffe lateral flow device testing,
the tests tests, sorry, you know, were validated as being suitable for certain types of testing.
And so that was a very kind of strong push in the university to move to lateral flow device testing as well,
because the view being that you would be able to get many more tests done in a day
if people were doing LSD testing and just getting the results in front of them,
because all you need to do is supply the tests to people and tell them how to do the test, whereas our costs would be constrained by time.
That was only a certain number of appointments that you can in any day.
And so during that autumn I then got had to get involved in lateral flow device testing as well,
because by that point I was kind of the person who was responsible for operationally making sure that testing works in the university.
And that was an interesting experience as well because at the time we started that process.
Richard Hobbs, the professor of primary care,
had got funding to start a trial into the use of lateral flow device tests as a as a clinical trial and was using,
I think it was St Helens and Merton as trial sites to see that if you gave the students instructions
of how to use a lateral flow device test and they test themselves and they got a result.
But at the same time you give them a PCR test and you get that test result back, you know,
or lateral flow device tests giving you the same level of positives and negatives or is there
something about that use that makes them inherently less accurate as a as a diagnostic?
And that trial was going to take a number of months, I think, to complete.
And then other people in the university, I think John Bell was one of them saying we just need to get on with lateral flow device testing.
It will be transformative. We can't wait for this trial to complete.
So I think kind of ended up sort of a bit stuck between people who just wanted to implement
lateral flow device testing before the government had really kind of sanctioned it.
And people who wanted to continue to get the knowledge to understand that these tests were suitable for the use it was planned to put into.
So getting stuck between two professors on an issue that was partly scientific was was a was a moment.
And then and then in the end I think we got to a position where we were sort of overtaken by events.
So the government decided, I think it was probably in November that they wanted all students because students had come back,
I think during Michaelmas term of 2020, they wanted all students before they returned home to take lateral flow device tests.
And they had prescribed, you know,
they needed to take two tests a certain number of days apart in order to be sure that a negative was really a negative.
And they'd set up a kind of methodology with input from Deloitte as to how you could implement the system in the university.
And also being honest with you, we weren't really very keen on the approach that they took.
We thought it was labour intensive and complicated,
but the advantage of using their approach was that they would offer indemnities and they would offer,
you know, free supply of kits and equipment in order to do it.
And we spent quite a while trying to decide how we were going to fulfil their request of universities to test students.
And in the end we did our own thing.
So as well as having set up this COVID PCR testing process, we then set up what was known as the Christmas travel test process,
where another team of the same sorts of people building on the PCR system using the same I.T system, but developing it further.
We then set up a system within a few weeks. I think it took us about three weeks.
That enabled every student who wanted to test before they went home for Christmas
to do two tests in order to understand whether they were likely negative or not.
And at that point it felt like testing was never going to end. I mean, it was it was constantly evolving.
And by that point, Jill Rowe had she was absolutely exhausted, you know, because it had literally consumed,
you know, probably every waking hour from sort of June through until November.
So I got a second sort of testing director.
And by the end of our testing experience, we had three people who had done that.
And we've got some amazing statistics.
I can't remember off the top of my head of the number of tests that we administered throughout the whole period.
But the that that part of the response, which was not supporting the science, it was not kind of directly supporting the operation of the division,
but it was supporting the university's response was really time consuming on me personally.
And as far as the employees across the division were concerned, what sort of percentage of them were in and working on coded projects and,
and what, what were all the others doing and how was that managed?
Yeah, it's it's a it's a, it's a good question.
I remember at some point we kind of estimated the number of researchers who kind of needed to be in work for big reasons.
And I think I don't know. I think if we've got 5000 staff, it was probably something like, you know, up to a thousand staff were probably working.
On all projects related to COVID and to a degree, they sort of carried on as normal but within the guidelines.
So what were the law?
In some cases, so some of these laboratories that were active were operating, you know, rotas and shifts in order to comply with the law.
The what happened kind of with the rest of the staff varied depending on what the guidelines were.
So there were definitely short periods of time where if you weren't working on the COVID response, then you could not come into work.
Whether that meant you could work from home or not.
Were they furloughed or did they all have enough to do they did with a computer at home.
I would say that most of our scientists who weren't in kind of managed to do enough kind of remotely in terms of remaining productive in in some way.
We did furlough some staff, but staff who were furloughed tend to be ones where it was.
You could literally do nothing. So I don't know if you are like a receptionist in a building that was closed, you were furloughed.
But the amount of furlough, which it was, was pretty small because I think most people, even lab scientists,
you know, they spend a lot of that time in write up space or on computer models or bioinformatics, etc.
But there were periods where, you know, the only people at LAX were people who were working on COVID.
And that and that's where my sort of memory starts to kind of get very hazy.
But, you know, we got to a point and he might be mean, you know, by the end of 2020 that even with iterations of lockdown,
the lab based scientists, you know, we're still permitted to go to work,
though there might be kind of constraints and guidelines that mean that the the
capacity of the building to accommodate the scientists who are constrained,
that they weren't prohibited from going to work.
So so a lot of lab scientists would have had a period where they weren't to work and then gradually increased back and probably for some,
you know, couldn't come back as often as quickly as they wanted because the guidelines on buildings didn't allow it to happen.
I guess a significant number of sort of either office based scientists or professional support staff,
the vast majority worked offsite for most of that time.
And indeed, you know, that has embedded to a degree even now, you know, hybrid working has completely changed the way we work.
But for long periods of time, you know, you only ever saw professional service staff working in their bedrooms or in their in their lounges.
I went to site pretty much every day.
I kind of felt that there were sort of enough reasons and instances of things where actually being able to have a conversation,
even if it was, you know, 5 minutes apart on a bit of grass on a playground, kind of warranted.
And I think that was just a kind of wanting to maintain some visibility of myself within the.
Our business, which of course ultimately is an on site business, you know, our education.
So it has to be done onsite. So I went I did very little working at home during that period.
Mm hmm. And was there a.
Any awareness or any sense that they the well-being or mental health of the workforce was something that needed to be attended to,
either because they were overworking or because they were isolated.
I mean, it did it did rise a kind of occasionally, I would say the most dominant health issue, of course, was COVID.
So that it was kind of the single obsession was about protecting people from getting COVID.
And when I reflect back now, I mean, it's really interesting when you cast your mind back that,
you know, some of the especially the early lockdown laws that were implemented.
It's hard. It's hard now to think that they exist.
So, you know, in that first period where you could only go outside your house when you're on your own for 15 minutes,
it gives a sense of just how the obsession with people not being able to infect each other with COVID was the only thing that seem to matter.
And so I think for long periods of time, there wasn't kind of a sort of lot of thought about, you know,
the broader impact that people were facing as a result of that significantly changed circumstances.
And I remember, you know, when we were we'd be debating within the university some changes in government guidance,
how we would then adopt that within the university.
And often there would be this kind of cautious approach about, well, you know, we might be permitted to relax something,
you know, to allow people to go back to work, but that might increase the risk of infection.
So maybe we shouldn't do that. And then, you know, people and I would make this argument kind of frequently myself.
You know, I have colleagues.
I think I think it's one of my kind of thoughts about at the time was that if you're like the decision makers in the university and I'm one of them,
tended to be quite senior staff who probably had a broadly common experience of COVID in terms of how it affected their work.
And so for many of them, you know, they'd be in a study or in a spare room that became a study in a house that they owned with their family, etc.
And of course, that isn't the experience of an awful lot of our staff.
You know, I had colleagues who, you know, we're living in a shared house, you know, five bedrooms,
tiny lounge and a kitchen who spent months finally working on their bed in a shared house.
And so when opportunities to relax our restrictions, that would mean that people could come back to work.
Some of these people were absolutely desperate to come back to work because they
wanted to get out of the situation they were in for our own mental health.
And so, you know, there were people and I would include myself among them,
saying we need to step out of our experience in private and think about the experiences of other people,
which are not our experiences, and that, you know, people want to come back to work.
We should be facilitating that, you know, for mental health reasons and isolation, etc.
So it did get fought about as it went home. But certainly I think early on it was everything was just focussed on the risk of infection.
And I guess that once it became clearer that we had some treatments and B when vaccines became available, the if you like,
the nervousness and sadness of what would happen if you did contract COVID started to reduce,
then that kind of balance of the things that we were worrying about,
we started to worry less necessarily about, you know, infection and worrying more about other issues,
about workload pressure and isolation and mental health issues because we had a better understanding
of the likely consequences of if you did get COVID or we did the risk of getting KP being reduced.
Hmm. Well, since it's come up now, I'll ask this question. Now, how threatened did you personally feel by the virus?
By the possibility of infection? It's a really interesting question.
So parts of my kind of covered story, you know,
and it always kind of infiltrates my thinking about it at a personal level kind of relates to my mother.
So my my mother in law, two days before Christmas 2019, my mom, who was due to go to my sister's for Christmas, said she wasn't going to go.
And my sister was concerned. So I went to see my mum and I arrived at my mum to find her.
I mean, the only way to describe it is seriously ill.
GP basically hiding a series of symptoms that turned out to be advanced bowel cancer and she was eventually admitted to hospital
in January of 2020 and she got discharged basically to die because they tried to do an operation but they couldn't complete her.
About two days before we moved out of our office, so about five days before lockdown.
And so my kind of experience of COVID, certainly during that first half of 2020, my mum eventually died, you know, in July 2020,
when I remember being covered head to toe in PPE, having been given dispensation to go into a nursing home, you know, to hold her hand while she died.
But my fear of COVID related entirely to my mum.
Yeah, a kind of personal I mean, I'm asthmatic, and early on I kind of worried a little bit about,
you know, when it was unknown would being an asthmatic be problematic.
But it didn't bother me. I mean, it just wasn't I wasn't worried about it in that sense.
But my daughter, who is immuno compromised,
compromised because she had so stiff colitis that worried me and that my mum, who was basically dying, that worried me.
And so my, my fear about getting COVID was entirely around the risk of then transmitting it on to someone else.
And the and it was a really complicated time because, you know, obviously there were all the rules about not mixing in households.
My mum lives on around you by dying on the road in a home.
And so I'm trying to kind of adhere to the rules.
And, you know, I remember she and I had this conversation because she didn't really understand what it was about.
It must have been a bit surreal for her.
And, you know, she kind of basically sort of said to me eventually that, you know, she would rather in some way see me,
even if that was just kind of, you know, visiting or an evening through the window and speak to her.
That may not go there at all for fear of giving her COVID.
So so all of all of my kind of worries about COVID were about the risk of my getting COVID and giving it to someone else and the influence of that.
But personally, I kind of I was never particularly worried about it, which is slightly odd,
as I would kind of genuinely describe myself as having quite significant kind of health anxiety and catastrophizing about health issues.
But I did not worry about COVID. Did you ever get it?
Much interest? I did. I got it almost exactly a year ago.
So I been on holiday with my wife and her parents to suffer the end of last January.
And we're driving home, and my mother in law said that I don't feel very well.
And she had a bit of a temperature and a bit of a cough. And we were driving from Sulphur to Redding where where I lived.
And my parents in law live in West Wales.
And so we basically said, you've almost certainly got cold.
So instead of stopping a regular,
we just carried on driving all the way to West Wales to drop them off and then drive all the way back to Beijing without stopping.
In fact, because we were pretty convinced we would have carried it, having been in the car with them for so long.
And yeah, in the following days, all four of us, all four of us had COVID.
But and, and it wasn't very nice. But, you know, I've been vaccinated, I suppose.
Yeah. So I think you touched on this earlier.
I mean, you've mentioned various things that were different in your experience as a result of the pandemic.
The big one being the degree of collaboration between different units of the of the university,
but also things like hybrid working, working from home, too.
To what extent do you see the landscape having changed, and do you think that's going to be a permanent change and is it a change for the better?
Sorry, that was three questions. How how what is your observation about how going through that experience has changed,
how things are done in the university in general and the Medical Sciences division in particular?
Yeah. So. It is.
And I think I have thought about this quite a lot. So I guess my sort of to sort of.
Kind of observations about the experience is the.
So it's almost like a regret. So, you know, one one of the common features through COVID was.
The ability and the power of people in the university to work together to sort stuff out.
Now, whether that's the scientists, you know, running recovery or developing the vaccine, whether that was our testing,
setting up testing or any of the other responses in the university,
the ability to just see the problem and get on and deal with it in a agile, collaborative, energised way was one.
It's ridiculous. It was one of the best experiences of my career. I've been in the university 30 years and.
You know, the sense of pride and enjoyment about some of the things that we achieved and had to, because of COVID is exceedingly high.
And I suppose what I would say, and I think I have said this a couple of times, it's that it is a bit of a shame,
though, that it seems a little rare that you need a global pandemic that might kill millions of people.
For people in Oxford to work that way, and somehow we have to sort of try and cling on to that attitude and approach to doing things.
And my reflection about it is that we struggle with it so that so, you know, three years on or three years into the process,
do I think that we are now better in an institution of working collaboratively and agile on solving a common problem?
I don't know. And the reason I think I don't know is because often in Oxford there's no such thing as a common problem.
So the. The pandemic was really clear.
We knew what we were trying to do. We were trying to stop people getting being infected and dying from infection or being seriously ill.
And different parts of the university did different things to respond to that, from the macro to the micro.
But everyone at that point kind of agreed what the problem was, because as time has gone by, you know, we with, you know, conspiracies, etc.,
there are parts of the population who wouldn't necessarily agree that the problem was as seen by people,
but within the university was really clear what the problem was and everybody was working to to a common cause effectively.
Whereas normally I think in the university, it's not clear that we are very good at defining what are common causes.
And therefore I seem that there isn't that common cause,
some of these sort of different perspectives of people working on something come into play and they kind of brought up again something I'm sorry,
but up against each other.
So for me, the kind of lesson is about how do we better define things that we're trying to achieve in a way that if we bring a disparate group,
people back together to deliver something that we start from an understanding of, we have a common cause.
Because I think if we can instil a culture of defining something that we all agree should be delivered.
Kobe kind of demonstrated that the university across multiple parts of the university, both services, colleges,
academic departments, is able to kind of deal with massive issues sensibly and agility when there is an agreed thing to be solved.
So so for me, we've demonstrated we can do this.
The task is now how do we motivate people to act in that way more often within the university, whether we're going to be able to do that?
I don't know, because it could be that the threshold is really high, that it literally has to be saving millions of people's lives.
Other than that, we will have a different view. So that's why presumably this competition for resources.
So you're not currently in competition with each other for space or money or whatever?
Yeah, that that is that's a very valid point. Georgina that, you know, when I think about testing, it wasn't that money was no object.
There was an agreed budget for it, but we were never anywhere near spending that budget.
So we never kind of had to make difficult prioritisation decisions about within the project.
You can have this and you can't have that. So yeah, resource constrained environment makes that harder.
And I guess because COVID was a very clear common cause for the university, it was very easy for the university to dedicate sufficient resource to it.
And so there's a lesson in that, which is that if something is important to the university,
you dedicate enough resource to it and then you will make a success of it rather than we
sort of agree things are important things and they don't necessarily resource the properly.
So I think there are lessons in there that we need not to let slip.
And, you know,
I think there is also a risk that people just want to move on from from COVID and leave some of that memory of what worked so well behind.
And I guess some of us senior leaders have a responsibility to try and make sure we don't forget those things.
And we bet the more into the way we work. And I certainly tried to do that with projects.
The only thing I think, you know, common cause and appropriate resourcing is really fundamental point for me now, because I know we have those things.
We can do projects and achieve things much better than we had done before and have demonstrated that that was what kind it helped.
I mean, I think the other change.
It is the way the way we work has fundamentally shifted for a lot of people, Whether that's good or bad, it's probably good and bad.
So we clearly have retained, of course, the university and across medical sciences, a lot of hybrid working,
especially in those jobs where the nature of the job, it's not essential, but you have to be in a lab.
So people who are office space, there's a lot of ongoing hybrid work and I think that has definite advantages.
I'm working at home today and you know, for me, you know,
that removes a kind of hour of commuting out of my day and that hour tends to be dedicated to working for the university rather than,
you know, lounging around.
And I feel a bit less stressed by by not having as much travelling to do it potentially, you know, offering more flexibility to staff, I think,
you know, helps with retention and it helps with recruitment and I think can be seen as recognising work life balance gets a bit better so that,
you know, if you need to be home because you know someone's going to come and fix your
washing machine and you can work from home and allow that to happen more easily, that's kind of a benefit for keeping the workforce a bit happier.
I think that the dis benefits are I don't know whether we've really measured them yet.
So, you know, I kind of try to imagine during COVID, it's a bit back to that, you know, working on your computer in a bedroom, in a shared house that,
you know, if I'd spent the first two years of my career in ICU, in my bedroom,
you know, during COVID, and then that I kind of continued as a working model.
And I hadn't been exposed on a day to day basis, you know, to people I mean, a rich happy time or economise,
etc., you know, would would my experiences and knowledge be as rich as they were?
I think we done a lot of people, both directly and indirectly in terms of, you know, styles and behaviour, etc.
And in the end it's very hard to do that remotely.
You know, you bump into someone in the corridor, you might ask them a question about something because you've just bumped into them,
whereas you might not kind of bring them up on Zoom or teams to ask them that question because it feels like a step above.
So I think there are definite benefits, but whether whether we've understood all of the this benefits,
I'm not yet clear about, but I don't think it will ever go back to being how it was pre-COVID.
And certainly some of the things I guess, that the university has adopted because of COVID,
like, you know, PTA meetings such as there's lots of organisations that use these things.
Before COVID happened, it was just that we were quite, quite backward in that in that sort of thing.
So yeah, it's yeah, I think I'm still on the fence as to the size of the benefit versus the size of the,
the downside of what I think will impact as a different, different way of operating.
Another any permanent legacy. Seven. I'm thinking of the Pandemic Sciences Centre.
Would that have happened if we hadn't had a pandemic? Are there other bits of restructuring in the division that have happened as a result?
Well, I mean, the pandemic sciences industry, it's kind of it's all been interesting.
So for a long time. I'd say at least 15 years, maybe longer, because because I've been involved in at least two bits.
We've sought to get funding to build what for a long time was.
No. What was it? It was known as the vaccines infection and immunity immunity building,
which would have incorporated much of what's going in the pandemic science is institute.
So it has been a kind of long standing ambition.
I think what the pandemic has done for the Pandemic Sciences Institute has kind of given it a
much more visible meaning to the outside world as to why we wanted a vape in the first place.
And it has. I think the pandemic did demonstrate that the scientists, many of them are kind of really interesting characters, super successful.
But what the pandemic did demonstrate is these people can work together and that what the pandemic science is needs to,
I think is building on is that kind of sense of community that the pandemic really visibly kind of created of scientists in different groups,
different institutes, different departments coming together to deal with a bigger question.
And and I therefore think, you know, the the the validity of that project has been massively enhanced by what's happened during the pandemic,
both from the need to be able to respond and prevent future pandemics,
but also by demonstrating that it isn't the case of just putting a large disparate people in one big building to never talk to each other.
It will help to continue to facilitate that collaboration across those groups in particular areas,
and that that collaboration is kind of, you know, the added value that will make the biggest difference, I think.
What was the other part of that question? Again, I think those were the two parts of the oh, I guess unless there are any other sort of permanent.
Is there any other permanent legacy that you can see?
No, no, no, no. I mean, the division feels in many ways much the same as as a as it was, though, different parts of it.
I've got more prominence now and different individuals, I think, have got more prominence as a result of some of their work in the pandemics.
And there have been you know, there have been some sort of not restructurings,
but some of the vaccines activity is now kind of in a more spread within the division.
So, you know, one of the things we haven't talked about actually was Helen MacShane and her COVID Challenge study.
And I remember that consuming a lot of time and the division did get heavily involved in that because there were some,
you know, a range of views about whether we should be doing a COVID study, a challenge study at all.
So this means giving giving the virus to two vaccinated, healthy volunteers.
You know, and we you know, we basically created a facility, a safe facility in order to do it.
But that activity is being done even though it's, you know,
on healthy adults that's being done and run by Helen McShane through the Department of Paediatrics.
And, you know, Andy Pollard is in that department, whereas previously, you know, they stopped some of their stuff.
It all had been focussed in MDM. Taslim I think has now had a vaccinology in the Department of Paediatrics, whereas before she was in MDM.
So it is leading to some sort of changes in the sort of focus of where vaccinology research takes place in the division.
So it's kind of not, not all in one place, it's in different parts of the division in terms of the academic department.
So it's very it is impacting, of course, the pace.
And final question really,
is there anything about your experience through the pandemic that's changed your own approach to your work or your attitude to it?
I have a I sort of have a. I sort of I thought I'd always had a bit of a sense of stuff that doesn't really matter that you know.
University administration can encompass a lot of unnecessary activity.
I think this expression has been coined recently in the university, probably a longstanding one,
about doing busy work, people doing things for the sake of doing things and being busy.
But actually when you unpick it, what's the purpose or the function of the thing that that's being done?
And so I think one of the things that the pandemic has done to me is because.
If you like, the pace, the resource, the urgency of that is that there was a very kind of.
Pragmatic, agile, sensible approach to how things could be done or needed to be done, you know, focussed on the end point.
What are we trying to do? What needs to be done to actually move us towards reaching the end point?
And I always had to bear that in my mind, which is about not really enjoying doing things,
you know, either for the sake of it or because we've always done that that way.
But I feel kind of much harsher now about it.
But, you know, where I see processes in the university that clearly don't add any value if there are processes,
we're getting rid of them If they're other people's processes, we're calling them out.
So so it's almost like threw into sort of sharp light what's important and what's not important in order to be able to get get things done.
I still, I guess. Struggling a little bit.
It's about for me. What it means for me as a kind of leader.
So, you know,
I've got a team of about hundreds of people and the dynamic of the way we work in a post pandemic and during the pandemic is as important.
And that's kind of made me reflect a little bit on, you know,
how how do you kind of effectively lead a team where you don't see them as often as as you used to say.
So that's kind of like sort of self self-reflection.
But I think the I think the most positive thing for me is that, you know, again,
it just I think early on you've asked that question about clinicians and working with clinicians.
It's kind of really reinforced to me the sense of collegiality and teamwork that exists
between professional support staff and the scientists in medical science is that,
you know, we are kind of one, one big team and, you know, that's how we operate.
So so that's more of a reinforcement of the view that a kind of game changer you.
Wonderful. Thank you very much. Okay.