Redeployment: what have we learnt?

There has always been a need for the short-term redeployment of staff. The COVID-19 pandemic required a redeployment at scale to enable the required response to the demand for care of patients with COVID-19, while many other clinical pathways were paused.

Guidance was rapidly produced by NHS England (2020) on managing the redeployment of staff during the pandemic. However, there has been very little research evidence to guide us. Moreover, there is no existing research on the long-term impact of the different kinds of redeployment on staff outcomes, wellbeing, performance and retention.

My trust, along with two others, is participating in research funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) (2020) concerned with this issue. The team is leading two work packages (WP) to address the research questions:

The initial findings of WP1 were shared at a recent Royal College of Nursing congress, exploring the experiences of nurse managers who made decisions about redeployment during the pandemic. At my trust, we have discussed our findings to learn from them and influence future practice. Nurses who were interviewed perceived several concerns about how the redeployment was conducted.