gms | German Medical Science

Background and status of (inter)national research: Recently, co-creation has been used to enhance the responsiveness of research and innovation. It describes a shift in thinking from the primary enactors as definers to a participative process in which researchers, practitioners, and pandemic planners jointly generate and develop praxis relevant results. Co-creation is at the heart of the European Commission’s definition of public engagement in responsible research and innovation, where it is defined as ‘co-creating the future with citizens and civil society organizations, and bringing on board the widest possible diversity of actors that would not normally interact with each other, on matters of science and technology’ (EC 2016, par 1).

Research question and objective:This presentation will introduce and describe the series of stakeholder workshops conducted as part of the BMBF funded CoronaCare project.

Method or hypothesis: CoronaCare is an ethnographic study led by the Institute of Social Medicine and Epidemiology at Brandenburg Medical School. The project examined the social consequences of the regulations introduced to prevent the spread of the virus, with particular attention to care relationships in both professional and everyday settings (Paul et al. 2021). The project aims to impact future pandemic preparedness plans by foregrounding the social consequences of pandemic regulations. The research team conceptualized and led three co-creative workshops to devise evidenced based recommendations which might in turn inform policy at regional and national levels.

Results: The workshops took place online and were comprised of focused discussion sessions with small group and plenary components. The discussion was derived from case vignettes sourced from qualitative interviews during the early lockdown phase of the pandemic in Germany. The interviews provided insight into the daily lives of nursing home facility and residential facility managers during early 2020.

Discussion: The small groups were composed in order to create a fruitful dialogue between the different participants. The themes identified in the project analyses as fundamental to "pandemic" daily life were used for the case vignettes as well as the thematic focus of the workshops. In the small group work, specific and salient features as well as the problems negotiated therein were discussed based on the professional perspective of the participants and ultimately recommendations in the form of guidelines were proposed.

Practical implications: We have submitted our pandemic management recommendations for publication in an academic journal. The recommendations compliment and address shortcomings in conventional pandemic planning.

Appeal for practice (science and/or care) in one sentence: We derived empirically informed and theoretically engaged recommendations for how pandemic management might more effectively grapple with the complexities and challenges for care and care work created through the Maßnahmen.

Funding: BMBF-Strukturförderung Versorgungsforschung; 01KI20117