Rapidly formed COVID-19 teams in the NHS: implications for leadership, team-working, career intentions and individual mental health.

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A key component of the NHS (and global) response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been toreinforce acute and critical care capacity, through an unprecedented re-deployment of personnelfrom different care pathways into fluid teams consisting of volunteers, student doctors and nurses,and in some cases military personnel [1-4]. These COVID-teams provide a unique opportunity toexamine the interaction of many of the established factors for successful delivery of medicalteamwork and care. Current evidence suggests that without common teamwork, sharedcommunication patterns and clear leadership structures, the ad-hoc and fluid nature of theseCOVID-teams increases risk to patient outcomes, delivery of care [5-9] and team memberresilience, mental-health and retention [10,11].This project will examine how non-technical factors for healthcare delivery (leadership, socialsupport & cohesion, communication, shared mental models, co-ordination) and expectedmoderating factors (occupational background, preparedness, work-life balance, home situation,proximity, workforce allocation models) impact on perceived COVID-teamworking andperformance, individual team member well-being and team member employment retentionintentions. It will be a mixed methods cross-sectional exploratory study of COVID-team members,clinical directors and senior hospital managers across a wide range of partnered NHS Trusts.Qualitative interviews will identify key themes and will be followed up by a more widely recruitedconfirmatory survey examining longer term individual well-being and retention intentions.Throughout, there will be a high emphasis on rapid dissemination of results to NHS partners andwider medical and other stakeholders to inform evidence-based workforce guidance andaccelerate team-working theory, practice and policy.