Covid 19 has changed the way we have operated this year, and the preparations for the second SERUMS Proof of Concept has not been an exception. During the first Covid wave at the start of the year, the entrance and activities in hospital were restructured to ensure strictly sanitary conditions.
Our carefully planned patient interaction, in which participants were to be recruited by the health professionals at the Hospital site and interviewed in an adjacent consultation room, were disrupted entirely and left only the virtual, online alternative as a 100% secure path to perform interviews with patients. This outcome resulted in a short notice rework of the whole process of patient recruitment and interaction, together with adherence to the resulting requirements of the Ethical Committee. This ensured that any modifications to our processes fitted the ethical framework of both our organization and the EU, and has been a new, unexpected and major workload of the study
Fortunately, the Proof of Concept is not strictly patient related and concerns the overall evaluation of the SERUMS project. The measure of success is assessed by a series of KPIs and metrics defined at the start of the project and evaluated using the opinion of participants, allowing us still to achieve our major in objectives within this part of the project. It is anticipated that we can all safely work towards the testing and evaluation of the SERUMS technologies, even in these strange times.
