This bank holiday weekend, in between stripping wallpaper and jet-washing the patio I finally read a book that had been sat on my shelf since the summer of 2021. The book, Vaxxers, is the story of Professor Sarah Gilbert and Dr Catherine Green and their teams in the development of the Oxford AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. I had heard Prof. Gilbert and Dr Green on Radio 4 and the feminist and science geek in me loved the fact that two women were at the forefront of spearheading the development of this vaccine, so I decided to take a look. 

The book gave me a wide range of learning about the process of vaccine development. As a pharmacy student, I spent a couple of summers interning in one of AstraZeneca’s largest manufacturing sites working on process improvement for a migraine nasal spray, so clean room environments became a passion of mine, but I had not come close at all to the principles or practice of research and development or clinical trials. 

I have taken away many learnings from the book - understanding the challenges and complexities of operating in academic research, dealing with funding cycles and the uncertainty of contracts and grants. What struck me most though was the agility, adaptability and pace that the Oxford team were able to move at mobilising the vaccine development.

Having seen information about the unknown SARs-like virus in very early January 2020, by 27 January, several weeks before a pandemic was declared or UK populations were locked down, the team had already designed the vaccine. This allowed rapid planning and acceleration into the next required phases of the vaccine development, around making the starting material, scaling up, going through clinical trials and moving to large-scale manufacturing. 

I know lots of people expressed concern about the speed of vaccine development and approval, and I must say reading this book has really helped me understand how that was possible. So how did they do it? How did they rapidly develop the vaccine and what relevance has that got for my workforce, I hear you ask. Don’t worry, I’m getting to that...

My reflections would be that whilst this ‘Disease X’ that the team was responding to was unknown, the way that they responded was not. The book clearly talks through the fact that the vector (think of it like the vehicle that carries the bit of the vaccine tailored to COVID-19) had been tried and tested before in other vaccine spaces the team had been working on. The team knew that as this was a coronavirus, there would not be two proteins (as with flu viruses) to target for vaccine development, instead it would be just one, the spike protein. They knew that genetic sequencing, the codes that are used to build proteins, would need to be optimised for recognition in humans.  

So what does this have to do with how we use our own workforce, specifically the experts we have?

Reading this book reminded me of how SCW supported in responding to national covid response needs. We brought in experts from varying spaces - clinical, workforce and HR, business intelligence, data systems and data warehousing as and when needed to rapidly develop a novel service that brought over 2,000 clinicians, many of whom were previously retired, together to support hundreds of thousands of patients.

I won’t go into all the details, but you’ll find a link to our case study at the end of the blog. Now, anyone could have been put into that team to develop that service. Whilst teams and organisations often acknowledge that they need an ‘expert’ for niche technical spaces like digital and technology or legislation relating to employee relations, industrial action, or equality, diversity and inclusion, I often hear teams think they can muddle along and delve into softer areas of expertise, like workforce transformation, analysis of data or organisational development and culture.  Whilst that may be true and many people can absolutely develop skills and knowledge in specialist areas over time, there is still something about in times of urgent need or pace, complexity or novelty, really embracing and inviting in the skills and experience of the subject matter experts around you, who have built years worth of knowledge on a subject.

Doing so turns a novel, new and complex situation into one that is less so - whilst some elements of the situation may be new (in this case the specific genetic sequence of the virus) lots of other elements were not new to the subject matter experts. They knew how to approach the problem, had options already tried and tested that could be adapted, were able to plan ahead as they knew what was coming and were ultimately able to shorten the process and increase the likelihood of improving the outcomes for all in doing so.

So next time you think to yourself that ‘it’s okay, I can do this’, whether it is writing comms, looking at data or planning workforce development, then please do take a minute to stop and ask yourself who may be better placed than me to do this and what do I not know that they may bring, that could help me do this better, more efficiently or quicker, in order to optimise outcomes for all.