COVID-19 has disproportionately affected healthcare staff from black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds. As the NHS is reliant on a diverse workforce, it is crucial to mitigate the impact of the pandemic on the wellbeing of BAME staff and thereby alleviate longer-term effects on service delivery and workforce planning. A current obstacle to achieving this successfully is a lack of understanding among healthcare organisations of how to design culturally appropriate and inclusive human resource management (HRM) practices that ensure BAME employees feel valued and supported. This 18 - month long study proposes to address this challenge by coordinating a survey, follow-up interviews, and a series of workshops in partnership with three NHS organisations. The partner organisations will provide links with their BAME/diversity networks and facilitate the recruitment of BAME staff employed directly and via employment agencies. Surveys of BAME staff at all levels will investigate staff perceptions of organisational support, estimate their effects on wellbeing and identify areas of need. Targeted interviews with BAME staff will provide unique insights into critical experiences and impacts of COVID-19 on the BAME talent pipeline. Finally, a series of workshops will engage NHS managers, BAME networks, and trade unions in co-producing HRM practices that target BAME staff wellbeing, progression, and retention. The project will lead to the development of a set of HRM practices and policy recommendations to transform organisational support for BAME employees. Organisational stakeholders and the research team will also co-produce a training framework and educational resources to raise awareness of BAME perspectives and wellbeing-oriented HRM practices. These will be piloted through the partner organisations and integrated into final deliverables.

Disruption resilient manufacturing is becoming increasingly important, with the current COVID-19 pandemic bringing this to the fore. Whilst COVID-19 was a natural disaster, the increasing digitisation of supply chains and manufacturing processes means further widespread challenges with respect to malicious activity and cyber attacks that can cause significant disruption. Whilst the news suggests many of these take place on digital platforms or within financial or health institutions, there is growing evidence that cyber-physical systems, such as manufacturing, are becoming more regularly targeted and therefore subject to disruption. For instance, a recent Cisco (2017) report found that 28% of manufacturers across 13 countries suffered cyber-attacks that resulted in revenue loss, with this set to increase as digitisation of the manufacturing industry increases. Therefore, it is crucial to identify methods of both securing against and reconfiguring if needed the point of production within the supply network should a string within the supply network become compromised. This research focuses specifically on additive manufacturing supply chains as part of a responsive manufacturing system, to address the significant security challenges within manufacturing supply chains to ensure greater levels of supply chain resilience for both UK and global manufacturing. In particular, this would address the call from Additive Manufacturing UKs (2017) UK National Strategy Report for AM, where they highlighted a critical challenge is to address security related challenges in AM production, with the importance of this increasing if production is to be distributed and responsive to emergent changes within the system, such as an adversary infiltrating elements of the supply chain. To support such rapid reconfiguration of the manufacturing system across the supply network, our vision is to create a practicable methodology for manufacturing systems that can detect a threat and reconfigure themselves rapidly in the presence of an adversary. The work packages developed as part of this research further address the critical challenges outlined above and underpin our vision through the development of 'double lock' system, of physical hash on the product and digital hash on component files secured against a distributed ledger technology, that can be scaled across and tailored to different SC configurations, allowing manufacturing to be responsive to disruption and enable greater resilience and agility in UK manufacturing SCs. This proposal also considers both the current state of the art in academic research, and the fundamental needs and applied research from industry. This research is transformative as it meets the twin hurdle of academic rigour and industrial relevance. To create tools and techniques for resilient additive manufacturing this research will address the following challenges: - How to develop effective techniques to detect disruption; - How to effectively and accurately analyse the disruption; and - How to respond to disruption through reconfigured manufacture.

The calculus of variations is the theory of how to minimise or maximise certain quantities. Most of the existing theory deals with quantities given in terms of the average (or integral) of certain values (which in turn depend on a function and its derivatives). There is a smaller body of theory on the question of how to minimise the maximum instead, but it currently covers only specific cases. This project aims to develop new methods with a greater scope, from an analytic point of view that can inform the design of numerical realisations.

Based on previously funded EPSRC research (EP/L006227/1) for the 'Development of a novel MALDI mass spectrometer and technology for the generation of multiply charged ions at high sensitivity' and subsequent initial exploitation of this new technology, the proposed project will develop a new instrument that specifically fulfils key requirements in clinical diagnostics as demanded by modern medicine, in particular in the age of new pandemics such as COVID-19. Accurate and fast characterisation of microorganisms in clinical samples are crucial for initiating optimal treatment and limiting the outbreaks of pandemics. Both accuracy and time are key to the best treatment outcome for the patient, minimising the time to recovery and more importantly minimising morbidity and mortality. In particular, the correct and rapid identification of newly discovered microbial pathogens or antimicrobial-resistant strains is important for the patient's recovery. Combined with the capability of large-scale testing, it will also allow for a better global response to (microbial) infectious diseases. Matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionisation (MALDI) mass spectrometry (MS) profiling of organisms (biotyping) has recently been established as a superior method to classical clinical microbiology assays for the identification of clinically relevant microbes with substantially increased classification accuracy and speed of analysis. This has already led to two FDA approved systems for microbial detection and identification by MALDI MS biotyping. In the proposed project, this methodology will be substantially advanced by exploiting multiply charged ions and their co-analysis with lipids and other biomolecules on a bench-top MS/MS instrument specifically optimised for large-scale, inexpensive clinical analyses, thus leading to the next generation of superior MALDI MS biotyping for clinical use and mass testing. The unique features of this new instrument and the associated technology will be high speed, cost-effectiveness, and high specificity by MS/MS sequencing. Combined with the unrivalled resolution of mass spectrometry this new technology will be a step-change in diagnostic testing by allowing the testing of multiple diseases within the same test run as well as being highly adaptable to new diseases without the need to develop test reagents that are disease/microbe-specific, difficult to source and therefore expensive, in particular for newly discovered diseases (cf. COVID 19). The aim is to reach a throughput level of 100,000 samples per day at high detection accuracy and low cost per sample. From collaborating with the biopharmaceutical industry and analytical instrument manufacturers, and from research of a BBSRC-funded grant, we found that our novel AP-MALDI MS ion source provides a sensitive platform for rapid assay analysis with the potential for use in the early detection of microbial diseases. The proposed project will build on this preliminary data, develop a new tailor-made instrument for future clinical use and explore the advantages (compared to current MALDI MS biotypers) in (a) speed, (b) the elimination of biological matrix background, (c) superior MS/MS analysis, (d) greater ion signal stability, (e) multiplexing capability and (f) the simpler (and cost-effective) but more flexible sample preparation that this new technology can offer.

There is an extremely high demand for laboratory-based blood tests from community settings in the UK and analysis suggests an important role in the future for remote blood monitoring that would enable patients and health professionals to carry out their own tests remotely, greatly benefiting patients and speeding up decision making. The COVID-19 pandemic has further highlighted the need for remote and connected blood testing that is beyond the online virtual clinics in the NHS outpatient setting. In current blood testing services for community healthcare, it is challenging to obtain and process blood samples outside of the clinical setting without training and lab facilities, and patients are required to attend a GP surgery or hospital for tests with travel burden and infection risk. Many blood analyses are done in batches that take a long time to build up, meaning the speed of blood sample analysis of routine tests and time taken for diagnosis are further challenges. Despite recent innovations in point of care, current blood analysis tools in practice are mainly mechanical or labour-intensive that require extensive filtering and manual tweaking and not suitable for regular at-home monitoring and longitudinal analytics. There is no personalised real-time approach available to inform disease complexity and conditions over time, which are critical for early detection of acute diseases and the management of chronic conditions. In England, around 95% of clinical pathways rely on patients having access to efficient, timely and cost-effective pathology services and there are 500 million biochemistry and 130 million haematology tests are carried out per year. This means inefficient and infrequent blood testing leads to late diagnosis, incomplete knowledge of disease progression and potential complications in a wide range of populations. Taking those challenges into account and current digital transformation in healthcare, this is a timely opportunity to bring researchers, clinicians and industrialist together to address the challenges of blood monitoring and analytics. The proposed Network+ will build an interdisciplinary community that will explore future blood testing solutions to achieve remote, inclusive, rapid, affordable and personalised blood monitoring, and address the above challenges in community health and care. To achieve the Network+ vision, research of technologies will be conducted from collaborations among information and communication technology (ICT), data and analytical science, clinical science, applied optics, biochemistry, engineering and social sciences in the Network+. The network will address three key technical challenges in blood testing: Remote monitoring, ICT, Personalised data and AI in a range of examplar clinical areas including cancer, autoimmune diseases, sickle cell disease, preoperative care, pathology services and general primary care.