COVID-19 Frontline Staff in Rapidly Formed COVID-19 Teams in the NHS: Implications for Leadership, Team-working, Career Intentions and Individual Mental Health, 2020-2022

A set of interviews with NHS COVID-19 frontline staff to investigate the influence of COVID deployment on non-technical factors for healthcare delivery (leadership, social support & cohesion, communication, shared mental models, co-ordination) and expected moderating factors (occupational background, preparedness, work-life balance and home situation, proximity, workforce allocation models) and the impact on perceived teamwork, performance, individual team member well-being, resilience and team member employment retention intentions for NHS COVID-team members. The interviews with medical staff consisted of demographic questions collecting some special category data (e.g., ethnicity, job title, living arrangements during COVID), a 12-item standardised measure of wellbeing (administered using the GHQ-12, a short form General Health Questionnaire) and an 8 item Work Life Balance Scale (Schwartz et al., 2019; Sexton et al., 2017). These are not included in the interview transcripts. The interview schedule then followed a topic based semi-structured component (informed by themes identified in our previous work (Reid et al., 2018; 2016; Schilling, 2019), the wider literature, and our preliminary conceptual framework across these four main areas: 1) the creation of teams and the experience of teamwork, social support, shared communication patterns, co- ordination and mental models; 2) the role of leaders in establishing teamwork, social support, shared communication patterns, co-ordination and mental models; 3) perceived individual and team performance, well-being, resilience and retention intentions; 4) moderating factors including occupational background, preparedness, home life, work-life balance and any other issues arising during COVID-team membership.