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Last year, the Health Research Board (HRB) joined the global fight against COVID-19. In cooperation with the Irish Research Council (IRC) and Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), HRB launched a rapid response mechanism to fund research that would provide evidence for the national and global efforts to tackle the virus outbreak. The funding call covered medical countermeasures, health service readiness, and social and policy countermeasures to COVID-19.

To start the year, we thought we would share some of the projects that researchers were busy working on in 2020 to help improve people’s health and wellbeing during the Covid-19 pandemic. So far, we have 19 articles published in the Coronavirus collection, which was set up to highlight research related to coronavirus on HRB Open Research, a partner publishing platform powered by F1000 Research. Read on for the article highlights, and to hear from the researchers we interviewed to discuss the work they have published as part of this funding call.

Safeguarding human participants

“It is vitally important that clinical research takes place during a pandemic,” says Lydia O’Sullivan, School of Medicine, University College Dublin, and HRB-Trials Methodology Research Network, Ireland. O’Sullivan published a Study Protocol to address concerns that scientific and methodological research standards might fall due to the urgency to produce results during the pandemic. “It is important to preserve public confidence by doing good quality research and by stating in publications if ethical safeguards were in place to protect human participants.” O’Sullivan explains, “Research participants may be more vulnerable in a pandemic situation because of illness and reduced contact with family, friends or physicians who would normally support their decision-making.”

O’Sullivan published the review on HRB Open Research to quickly and openly share her research, especially given that the publication was related to COVID-19. We asked O’Sullivan about her hopes for the review, to which she answered; “It will highlight whether COVID-19 clinical research publications report compliance with internationally accepted ethical standards, such as the Declaration of Helsinki, ICH-GCP, participant confidentiality and informed consent. We also aim to provide a description of how an Irish Research Ethics Committee adapted their working practices to provide timely yet thorough ethical review of clinical research proposals during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Supporting mental health for frontline healthcare workers

Frontline healthcare workers (FLWs) have been under stress due to COVID-19. However, there are currently no evidence-based guidelines for alleviating psychological distress in FLWs during pandemics. The current guidelines about mental health protection for FLWs in Ireland mainly relate to incidents, such as terrorist attacks and natural disasters.  

This inspired a team in the School of Psychology, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland to work on providing greater availability of mental health services tailored to the specific psychological needs of FLWs during the pandemic. When interviewed about the Study Protocol, project manager Laura O’Connor said: “As occupational stress is a significant contributor to burnout, medical errors, and resignation in healthcare settings, a guideline to promote psychological wellbeing in FLWs is crucial to maximize workplace efficacy, patient safety, and availability of healthcare staff throughout pandemics.” She declared, “We want to provide mental health professionals with an evidence-driven, stakeholder-informed framework from which decisions can be made regarding the promotion of psychological wellbeing in FLWs.”

O’Connor shares with us why she published on HRB Open Research: “As promoting psychological wellbeing in FLWs is of immediate importance, publishing with HRB Open ensures rapid dissemination of our protocol to other researchers and stakeholders in this area. Similarly, as addressing the problems faced by FLWs is dependent on the contributions of many academic disciplines, an open peer-review platform ensures that experts from numerous academic backgrounds can provide insights towards the rationale, justification, and methodologies proposed within the FLoWS project, and that these insights can be incorporated transparently and the evolution of the protocol tracked through public version updates.”

Compliance to social distancing measures

“The social distancing measures that we’ve seen during this pandemic are unprecedented in terms of the scale and severity,” says Chris Noone, School of Psychology, National University of Ireland, Galway. “The set of behaviours that come under the umbrella of “social distancing” were quite unfamiliar to people in everyday life and therefore also quite new as an area of investigation for many behavioural scientists.”

Noone’s Study Protocol sets out togather information about how different groups in society feel about physical distancing. It seems that people are less likely to stick to the socially distancing measures than the other important recommendations, such as washing your hands. He hopes that the research will be useful in tailoring future communications to encourage greater adherence to socially distancing measures.

Noone, and the team of researchers have taken the necessary steps to ensure the work carried out is reproducible, and shares why they decided to publish a Study Protocol, “we wanted to conduct this study as transparently as possible. It was one of a number of actions that we took in this project to adhere to principles of Open Science. We see Open Science as an integral tool in the fight against COVID-19 and we wanted to practice what we preach.”

Following on from this, he explains why open research and transparent peer review are essential to the team: “Trust in science is hugely important for public health. If we want the public to trust science and scientists, we should act in ways that earn trust. We believe that by adhering to Open Science principles that we do exactly that.”

Head over to the Coronavirus Collection, to read through all the articles published so far, and find out what other projects are underway or have been carried out in response to the pandemic.