HEES COVID-19 mini series – Part 1: Working from home

by Sarah Hill, Tara Homer, Will King and Matt Breckons

Welcome to the first instalment of the Newcastle HEES group’s COVID-19 mini-series. This series will comprise an indefinite number of blogs which will both analyse COVID-19 from a health economics perspective and reflect the working life of a health economist during this unprecedented time.

The first in this series is something the vast majority of you will no doubt be familiar with by now: working from home (WFH). This practice may have been familiar to some pre-COVID, although it most likely was a part-time agreement rather than a full-time necessity. To many of us, however, this was a fairly rare practice pre-COVID. Within our team, like many others, this shift in work practice has induced mixed feelings. This post intends to present the views of our new way of working from a range of perspectives and demonstrates that however you approach WFH, you are not alone! Whether you love it, hate it, or fall somewhere in between, this blog will hopefully provide readers with some camaraderie in your preference.

To begin, I write this as England enters what has been commonly termed “Lockdown 2.0”. On 20th March 2020, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the first Lockdown, announcing that all but essential services shut their doors (and simultaneously thoroughly scuppering my 30th birthday celebrations which were due to take place that weekend). By this point, many of us who “could work from home” had been doing so on a semi-voluntary basis for a number of weeks, however, the implementation of lockdown 1.0 saw the vast majority of the UK workforce leaving their offices behind for the foreseeable future. Since this announcement we have faced several months of WFH, with a brief period of about 1.5 months where Newcastle University allowed staff to return to the office on a strict rota, with capacity caps and stringent social distancing measures in place. Then in October, as the north-east entered the Government’s “Tier 2” restrictions, the university once again instructed all non-essential staff to return to WFH. As a result of the corona virus, we have spent approximately 6 of the past 8 months working from home offices, kitchens, living rooms, bedrooms, and any other space we had available to us.

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