The College has been working, through March and April, to support our members and advocate for the paramedic profession during the Covid-19 pandemic. Our Chief Executive Tracy Nicholls FCPara has written to both the Secretary of State for Health and the National Medical Director of NHS England on the need for sufficient and appropriate PPE to be available to paramedics and their healthcare colleagues. 

We continue to stand firmly alongside our colleagues at the RCUK on our position with regards to the appropriate level of PPE for resuscitation. We are working to make sure that the College is responding appropriately to any further releases or updates in position and available evidence. 

We have set up a Covid Response Group that will assist the College, and related stakeholders, to maintain a consistent narrative throughout the crisis, to capture and, where appropriate, relay pandemic response concerns from, the College membership to organisations and individuals across the health sector and to seek out opportunities to support the response and disseminate information to the membership.
 
Our Northern Ireland Trustee Rory O’Connor MCPara is working with the AHPFNI, lobbying Stormont on behalf of allied health professions, with regard to PPE provision also.  

A Covid-19 web page has been set up to provide the latest information on the Covid situation, including links to a range of resources. 

We have advocated strongly for the paramedic students going into the workplace as employees during this time. The College is working closely with HEIs and individual ambulance service trusts, to keep track, where possible, of; how many students are being employed, doing what roles, and from which programmes and which year. The College has issued advice and guidance for these student paramedics as well as holding a successful Live Chat Q&A session that can still be viewed on YouTube and the launch of the Temporary Registered (NQP) Student Support Resource. Links to all these resources can be found on the Student Support page on the College website.

The College takes the mental health of our members very seriously and have collaborated on a number of projects to increase the resources available to members and the profession. We collaborated with RCEM, AACE and RCGP on production of the Living Life To The Full mental wellbeing resource https://llttf.com/ and published guidance for managers on psychosocial support and mental wellbeing of ambulance personnel in a pandemic crisis. The work to support members’ wellbeing will continue with the latest links provided on our Covid19 web page. 

Research is ongoing by the College, with 3740 participants in the CARA research recently and Julia Williams and the College of Paramedics Research Development and Advisory Committee are now working hard on the analysis. Other projects are in the pipeline.

There has also been a great deal of press engagement by the College, some of which is captured here.