17/03/2023
Congratulations to the COVID CIRCLE team for its contributions to improved outbreak preparedness
In her recent blog post “Celebrating COVID CIRCLE”, Chantel Jones highlights the milestones and achievements of this joint UKCDR/GloPID-R initiative, which is in its final delivery stages.
COVID CIRCLE (the COVID-19 Research Coordination and Learning initiative) was launched in April 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the need for improved infectious disease research coordination, particularly in low-resource settings.
This informative article outlines the many ways in which COVID CIRCLE has contributed to strengthening global epidemic and pandemic preparedness. By bringing together GloPID-R’s rich global health expertise with UKCDR’s skills in mapping and analysis, COVID CIRCLE offers an excellent example of the value of strong collaboration between researchers to deliver practical outputs for research funders.
COVID CIRCLE has been made possible thanks to the generous support of UK DHSC, UKRI and Wellcome. Amongst its key deliverables are the COVID-19 Project Tracker and associated Living Mapping Review as well as the ‘Funders principles for research in epidemics’. The lessons learnt from these initiatives have paved the way for the development of “Pandemic Preparedness: Analytical Capacity and Funding Tracking Programme”. Named Pandemic PACT for short, this new GloPID-R/UKCDR collaboration aims to improve analytical capacity to monitor and analyse research funding for a broad range of diseases of epidemic and pandemic potential to support evidence informed action. It will do this through the development of a powerful new research tracker tool for funders as well as a series of rapid research need appraisals. Stay tuned for more news about Pandemic PACT in the near future.
