UK-REACH: United Kingdom Research Study into Ethnicity And COVID-19 outcomes in Healthcare workers

Globally many people, including healthcare workers (HCWs), are becoming ill and dying from COVID-19. We have evidence that people from ethnic minorities have a higher chance of going to intensive care and adying from COVID-19.This may also sbe the case for ethnic minorities working in the health system. We want to investigate this using existing data held by national healthcare organisations to understand what the risk of having, and dying from, COVID-19 is for ethnic minority HCWs. We will also follow a group of ethnic minority HCWs over 12 months to see what changes occur in their physical/mental health. In addition we will interview a smaller group of ethnic minority HCWs to understand how risky their jobs are, and how they have changed their professional/social behaviours in response to COVID-19. Using staff data and linking it to healthcare data may be sensitive and so we will explore how to do this in a way that is acceptable. Finally, we want the findings of this research to be useful for HCWs and so we have a stakeholder group of major national organisations to help us do the research, publicise the findings and make recommendations.