Date : 01/03/2023 | Time : 5:30 pm - 6:45 pm |
This talk will be on Zoom. The talk is free but you do need to book a place using the booking form below to get access details.
COVID-19 shone a spotlight on the work of scientists giving advice to government on responding to the pandemic. Was the model for scientific advice developed by the government the best? Now we have moved on from the crisis stages of the pandemic, what have we learned? Richard Gleave, who worked in PHE as part of the COVID response, will lead the discussion and review the lessons learned. During the discussion we expect to explore whether there are differences between giving advice during an emergency and during “business as usual”, whether scientific advice is different from economic, social and political advice and whether scientific advice is simply a more legitimate form of lobbying. Has our experience damaged the public’s faith in scientific advice? Have scientists lost faith in politicians? How do we handle contrary/conflicting scientific advice? How should the giving, and receiving of advice be organised?
This is a new style session for the Harkness Fellows Association. Rather than a talk followed by a Q&A, we are explicitly styling the session as a discussion since many Harkness Fellows were involved in the giving of scientific advice during the pandemic, and many others were leading health care bodies affected by that advice.
Richard Gleave (HF 2007-08) is Director of Scientific Strategy and Development in the Chief Scientific Officer Group at the UK Health Security Agency. He is also undertaking a D Phil at Oxford University looking at how national public health institutes use evidence to inform policy and practice. He will draw on both his work and his research to analyse the current models for giving scientific advice and share thoughts on alternative ways forward that build on a chapter he wrote about the organisation of scientific advice in the pandemic (in Waring, J. et al eds., 2021. Organising Care in a Time of Covid-19: Implications for Leadership, Governance and Policy). Richard was a Harkness Fellow in 2007-08 from his then post of NHS Performance Director at the Department of Health.
This talk will be on Zoom. The talk is free but you do need to book a place to get access details. Please ignore references to payment.
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