During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic the Health Foundation, like many other organisations, wanted to find ways to support the UK’s health and care system facing the specific challenges presented by COVID-19. As a funder of research, we also wanted to build evidence to scrutinise the measures that were taken in response to the pandemic and the long-term consequences of COVID-19.
The COVID-19 Research Programme was launched in 2020, aiming to inform policy and service delivery decisions about the future of health and care services in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The programme gave funding to UK-focused projects that explored:
Each team received between £100,000 and £200,000. The projects were all based around highly applied research that had direct relevance to policy and practice and were run by interdisciplinary teams that combined expertise from a broad range of disciplines. Each team involved patients, the public and/or people with lived experiences within their projects.
In October 2020, we also established the COVID-19 impact inquiry. This time-limited inquiry built on our research programme, seeking to explore how people’s experiences of the pandemic were influenced by their pre-existing health and health inequalities, and the likely impact of the response to the pandemic on people’s health and health inequalities.
The research programme findings and the cross-cutting themes from the projects we funded as part of this programme have been summarised by Hardeep Aiden, Research Manager, 'The COVID-19 pandemic: where do we go from here?'.
The Health Foundation will continue to build on this funded research and determine where there may still be unanswered questions. In addition to this funded programme, the Foundation has supported work to establish how a long-term research agenda might create a UK more resilient to future health shocks such as COVID-19.
Research into how changes to the way that maternity care was delivered during the COVID-19 pandemic affected inequalities of outcomes and care for women and babies of different ethnicities across Engl...
Research to help understand the impact of changes in health service delivery on cancer care during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ten teams have been selected to be part of the Health Foundation’s new COVID-19 Research Programme. The programme is seeking to understand how health and social care service delivery has changed in li...
Research to assess the potential impact of economic and welfare policy responses to COVID-19 on mental health and mental health inequalities, including who is impacted the most and what the likely con...
A research project exploring the roll out of ‘asynchronous’ consultations at scale in NHS Grampian, to provide practical learning for future use across the NHS.
Research project to understand the role of community-led action as a protective factor against widening health inequalities during, and in recovery from, the COVID-19 pandemic.
Research into what the geographical and social inequalities are in COVID-19 cases and deaths in England, and which individual and place-based factors explain these inequalities.
Research on the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of emergency surgery versus conservative management, to inform decision-making during the COVID-19 recovery period.
Research into the impact of COVID-19 on legal obligations within adult social care and safeguarding across England and Wales, to provide an understanding of how the pandemic has affected adults with c...
This project aimed to better understand the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the health, wellbeing and economic security of ethnically diverse families, both in the short and long term.