Money will go to researchers creating ‘permanent public resource’ to inform pandemic policy and practice
The Arts and Humanities Research Council has awarded £1 million to researchers documenting the experiences of NHS staff during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Led by academics at the University of Manchester, NHS Voices of Covid-19 has already collected over 200 memories of this tumultuous time since it launched in March.
The research council grant will enable project leader Stephanie Snow, a medical historian at the university, and her team to link up with the British Library’s oral history department to create a “permanent public resource” to help inform future policy and practice, the research council said on 21 August.
Snow’s work forms part of a wider ‘NHS at 70’ oral history project, which is capturing the stories of people who worked in and were cared for by the NHS since its creation in 1948.
“Covid is producing seismic shifts across lives and communities and its social significance in terms of a public health crisis is unprecedented in living memory,” she said.
“It is a watershed moment in the longer history of the NHS so we are asking how have public attitudes to the NHS changed, what does care mean and who should provide it? These are vital questions that we will only be able to answer if we document the effects and impacts on all our lives by capturing personal testimonies.”
Participants in the project include the doctor who treated prime minister Boris Johnson in intensive care and a nurse working on the front lines in a London hospital.