Enhancing the Use of ResilienceDirect in the Covid-19 Response, 2020-2021

This dataset contains 20 interviews conducted with UK emergency response practitioners during the Covid-19 response in 2020 and 2021. The purpose of the interviews was to understand how ResilienceDirect - a multi-agency digital collaboration platform - was used during the Covid-19 response.The proposed research will explore and enhance how the ResilienceDirect (RD) digital collaboration platform is used by multi-agency Local Resilience Forums (LRFs) to remotely plan and respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. The research aims to produce the first independent evidence base for LRF practitioners, national policymakers, and scholars, to understand how RD is being used to facilitate LRF collaboration and to then rapidly circulate best practices through RD to enhance the UK’s planning and response to COVID-19. The national scope of the COVID-19 pandemic presents a unique opportunity to compare how RD is being used to enable collaboration across different LRFs. This analysis will: a) diagnose sub-optimal uses of RD within LRFs; and b) help identify best practice solutions for joint working on RD within, and between, LRFs. These findings will be identified and communicated to all UK multi-agency emergency forms on a monthly basis via the ‘Learning and Development’ section on the RD platform. This research will provide timely, cyclical, feedback on the effective use of RD to support multi-agency collaboration. This project is designed to deliver immediate impact to improve the UK’s response to COVID-19 as well as critical insights into the role of technology in facilitating emergency collaborations that will benefit future responses.