Runtime: March 2020 – ongoing
Client: The research is partly funded by NWO
Project description
With health systems and societies being overwhelmed by Coronavirus and Covid-19 patients, it is of crucial importance to study societal responses to the crisis. From the beginning of March we have therefore started collecting data. With a team of researchers we have been observing the crisismanagement teams in Erasmus MC as well as the municipality of Rotterdam in order to learn about the ways in which the crisis is handled from a hospital as well as a societal perspective. Furthermore, we interview GPs, nurses and ex-patients to come to grips with experiences ‘on the ground’. And we have been involved in a big questionnaire study in the Rotterdam population to get a feel for how Corona is affecting citizens more generally. Whilst the biggest research effort is currently focused on the Netherlands, we are also collaborating with international partners to study Corona in Low- and Middle-Income Countries.
With the unfolding of the Corona-crisis we will continue to follow the policies and practices that are set up as well as their consequences. And we will look for opportunities to get funding for research as well as to collaborate with national and international partners. In order to accommodate this, we for example have published an agenda for research (see below), calling for other researchers to join in the effort, and we have contributed to a blog-series comparing Corona-responses across the world.
As the acute phase of the Corona crisis seems to be over—at least for now and at least in most countries—we are now moving into its ‘chronic’ phase, posing new questions about the ways in which healthcare systems can function and should be governed as well as questions about how the ‘new normal’ will affect daily and organizational life. How this ‘dance with the virus’ is done and to what consequences will be our focus for the time to come.
Team
Roland Bal, Hester van de Bovenkamp, Bert de Graaff, Sabrina Huizenga, Violet Petit, Nienke van Pijkeren, Annemiek Stoopendaal, Iris Wallenburg
Publications
- Layering risk work amidst an emerging crisis; an ethnographic study on the governance of the COVID-19 pandemic in a university hospital in the Netherlands
- Unmasking a health care system: The Dutch policy response to the Covid-19 crisis
- Practicing Corona - Towards a research agenda of health policies
- Surinam’s Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic
- The Netherlands’ Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic