Hundreds of staff and students at a Midlands university are joining the fight against Covid-19.
The University of Leicester is fast-tracking its 2020 medical graduates so they can get to work on the front line of the NHS.
At the same time academic and clinical staff who work with the NHS have joined the fight, while hundreds of staff and students have volunteered to help the health service.
The university said it was letting medical students join the NHS fully qualified before the traditional end of the academic year.
The final year students will already have been working in the health service, but the university’s decision means they can be fast-tracked into formal roles, and provide much needed support within a health service where one in four staff are currently off sick or in isolation.
The university has already donated thousands of essential items to hospital workers including masks, disposable aprons, handwash, sanitiser and gloves.
It has also lent £100,000-worth of liquid handling equipment to help the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust process COVID-19 samples.
As well as that, while the university campus is shut, some staff have been allowed to stay on and carry out Covid-19 research.
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University Vice-Chancellor Nishan Canagarajah said: “All our doctors and academics who have contracts to work with the HNS are being released to work with the NHS. That is close to 200.
“We are also graduating our medical students early next month – rather than wait until July – so 200 of our medical students can go and work in hospitals very soon.
“We are bringing forward all the assessments. Those students are already working, it just means they can do other tasks such as prescribing medicine. It means they can do a lot more.
“On top of that about 300 of our staff have signed up as volunteers and we are also doing quite a lot of research, for instance, on whether there is a low cost way of detecting the coronavirus using the mask that was developed for detecting tuberculosis.
“That research may not solve the problem now, but if there is a second wave or third wave there will be a simpler method for assessing if somebody has coronavirus.”
Prof Canagarajah said early graduation for the key workers was just one of the radical changes the university is making to deal with the impact of the current emergency.
All teaching and assessments will continue online next term, he said, although assessments for first and second years are being stopped, without detriment to grades.
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Broadly speaking the university has almost 17,000 students and about 3,500 staff, and the shutdown is having an impact on the university’s £330 million annual turnover, although the fact that they were less reliant on foreign students than other universities might help.
Refunding students for unused accommodation next term, however, will cost the university about £5 million.
The Vice-Chancellor said he was working on various scenarios.
Best case would be reopening in the autumn term, although he felt the most likely scenario would be starting again next January.
Worst case would be the campus remaining closed throughout the 2020/21 academic year – with some online teaching from September, so new students can at least be admitted this autumn.
Either way, Prof Canagarajah said he hoped to avoid redundancies.
He said: “The key question is what difficult decisions do we have to make to deliver, or deal with, those scenarios?
“My best case is that because we are not so dependent on international student numbers it will be about making sure we can recruit home students.
“I know it’s painful, but this crisis will come to pass and when it does we need the workforce ready.
“To produce a doctor takes five years and to produce a nurse takes three years, so we can’t just skip a cohort. The country would struggle, as will businesses.
“So the question is how soon can we start taking in new students? The number one priority is how we can graduate the right workforce in three to four years time.
“It’s an unprecedented situation. Nobody expected this to happen and it’s turned everything upside down in terms of the university.
“I would say we have responded well to the current crisis, and I said from the outset the number one priority was the health and wellbeing of my staff and students, so our decisions pre-empted some of the Government decisions.
“For example on March 12, I told my team we will start teaching online on March 16. All the teaching would be online, all the seminars, everything would be virtual.
“I was truly humbled by all the staff working through the weekend to turn that around. All the other universities did it the following week.
“When the Government said the schools would be closed I took the decision the following day to close the university. A lot of staff had kids who go to school so it’s impossible for them to go to work when the kids are at school. We closed it on March 20.
“The feedback from university colleagues is that we were in charge rather than reacting.”