Following on from last week’s survey where members told us about the coronavirus impact on dementia research, the SDRC have created the COVID-19 Impact Report. This report outlines the severe impact that is already being felt. Researchers have told us about the effect across all aspects of their work, including job security, future prospects and scientific quality.

Read the SDRC COVID-19 Impact Report 

The main findings indicate the vast majority of respondents had had their research put on hold (70%) with only 28.3% believing that some form of extension to their work wouldn’t be required. Only 25% felt at this stage that the lock down has affected grant attainment. The reduced activity in the respondents own research pre-COVID has not been mitigated by moving their research work to COVID-19 related research that has only taken place in 14% of cases. After only four weeks of lockdown, 78.4% of respondents considered that the lockdown might or was already having an impact on their job security.

From the report, the SDRC Executive have put in place a strategy which involves passing report directly to the Scottish Government in addition our ongoing efforts to address the requests made by ECRs and raising these at the highest levels and will work on an ongoing basis to work through each of the challenges and potential solutions brought to our attention.

Following on from this report, we will re-run a similar survey in mid-July 2020 to gauge progress of SDRC interventions as well as further consequences of the coronavirus impact on dementia research. 

Please rest assured that the SDRC are doing all we can to support our members and research more widely at this time. To keep up to date with the work the SDRC are doing to help the ECR community, check out our blog or follow us on Twitter.

If would like to know more about the work of the SDRC, find out more here