Global Academies COVID19 Response

Through our Global Academies staff, students and stakeholders are pulling together to tackle the coronavirus pandemic and its impacts.

Immediate support included donating our Personal Protective Equipment to the local health board, loaning our Thermo Fisher 7500 ABI Fast Platform machines to support the development of a new mass testing facility for Covid-19 at Milton Keynes and working with Welsh Blood Service to establish a temporary blood donation centre on our Llandaff campus following a 20% reduction in donors and the need to distance such services from hospitals responding to Covid-19 patients.

Our longer-term research and innovation efforts range from monitoring the societal impact of the pandemic to providing specialist support to the food industry and developing a productivity research programme to support Welsh firms in the post-Covid recovery.

Our case studies give you an insight into some of the ways our Cardiff Met Global Academies are contributing.

Health and Human Performance

The COPE project leads: Dr. Rhiannon Phillips (PI) Cardiff Metropolitan University and Dr. Emma Thomas-Jones (Co-PI) Cardiff University

UK Study of Public Experiences during COVID-19 pandemic

In March 2020, as the coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic was escalating in the UK, psychology researchers from Cardiff Met's School of Sport and Health Sciences and Cardiff University's Centre for Trials Research very quickly designed an online survey to find out about the experiences of people living in the UK during the outbreak. This was one of the first projects of its kind in the UK. The survey explored the realities of what was happening for the UK public at the beginning of the lockdown—aiming to understand what members of the public were thinking, feeling, and doing during the early days of the crisis and how they were responding to communications from governmental and health services. Read more

Rachel Hart

Cardiff Met Student: Rachel Hart (CSESP)

Rachel Hart, a final-year BSc (Hons) Health and Social Care student from the Cardiff School of Education and Social Policy, has been working as a wellbeing connector during the COVID-19 lockdown speaking with people about social isolation, loneliness, and mental health issues. Before the coronavirus pandemic, Rachel worked in a social prescribing-based role speaking with people face to face about the different issues they were facing and helping people to become more integrated with their community. Since the lockdown, Rachel has been working from home and receiving telephone calls from people who have been referred by the Cardiff South West Cluster of GP surgeries. Her work has involved speaking with very lonely people dealing with social isolation or bereavement, people who chronic health conditions, and people just out of the hospital. Rachel provides these people with weekly wellbeing calls to check in with them and have a conversation about their lives. She has found that a lot of people really appreciate these regular conversations about their wellbeing—especially elderly people. Rachel said, “It is often a difficult role when faced with very upset lonely people that you can only chat to at the end of the phone, but it is very fulfilling knowing that I am making a small difference to those people’s lives and I love my job because of this.”

To can contact Rachel about her community work at st20086762@outlook.cardiffmet.ac.uk. Learn more about the ACE (Action in Caerau & Ely) charity that Rachel works with here

Cardiff Met Student : Phillip Mpukusa

A student from the Cardiff School of Education and Social Policy, Phillip Mpukusa, has been distributing sporting and exercise equipment during the COVID-19 lockdown to those in need. Since the lockdown began in March 2020, Phillip noticed that the majority of sporting activities were cancelled, following government guidelines to stay at home. Phillip is active in the tennis industry in Wales and had access to some sporting and exercise equipment including yoga mats, skipping ropes, badminton rackets, and exercise resistance band sets. He began to distribute this free sporting equipment to children and youths to ensure they kept active at home. As the lockdown continues and people are spending more time indoors, Phillip has formed a community WhatsApp group to facilitate community projects such as free online yoga classes for beginners using Zoom software.

You can contact Phillip about his community project at st20168140@outlook.cardiffmet.ac.uk.

Food Science, Safety and Security

Food Innovation Wales and ZERO2FIVE Logos.

Industry hotline and toolkit launched to support Welsh food and drink manufacturers during COVID-19 pandemic

In response to the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic, colleagues at the ZERO2FIVE Food Industry Centre at Cardiff Metropolitan University found innovative ways to use their technical and commercial expertise to support Welsh food and drink manufacturers. Companies of all sizes were facing unprecedented stress on their food supply chains during the outbreak, with demand growth on their factories, workforce, and procedures. The Food Industry Centre, in conjunction with the Welsh Government Food Division and Food Innovation Wales partners, developed helplines in each of the three food centres in South Wales, Mid Wales, and North Wales to connect industry with experts who were able to answer specific enquiries relating to enhanced food safety, technical issues, supply chain continuity, and emergent governmental and health guidelines.

Improving food safety and technical innovation in the Welsh food sector

A Bachelor of Arts (Hons) Accounting student from the Cardiff School of Management has been busy during the lockdown cooking Jamaican ‘heart & soul’ supper boxes for key workers. Since the beginning of lockdown in March 2020, Floyd Houghton has served over 250 gifted meals to neighbours, friends, and friends of friends working as key workers in various sectors, including midwives, doctors, delivery drivers, nurses, care workers, and teachers. Floyd runs a part-time pop-up business called Yaardiff Yum and was hoping to formally launch his business this summer. This launch has been put on pause during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Floyd has used his cooking expertise to make an important community contribution by feeding frontline workers during these uncertain times. Floyd has self-funded this community endeavour—buying the ingredients from local stores, with delivery assistance from family members to deliver the supper boxes.
Floyd feels that this experience has strengthened his cooking skills, helped him contribute to his community while socially distancing, and fuelled his ambition to raise funding to expand his upcoming pop-up business. The supper boxes include traditional home-cooked Jamaican food, inspired by recipes by his great-grandparents taught to Floyd by his father, a retired chef, who grew up in Jamaica and emigrated to Wales in the 1990s. As a Black-owned business, growing in Wales, Floyd wants to showcase his family’s Jamaican food and culture of oneness and kindness to diverse groups across Cardiff to strengthen community relations.
These are just a few of the lovely messages Floyd has been sent from the recipients of his supper boxes: “Work has been hard this week, to come home to this was wonderful. We devoured it and it was absolutely delicious. You have quite a talent. It really was like sunshine on a plate” and “That was truly the best meal!! After difficult days on the COVID wards then being ill myself for 3 weeks, that was like medicine and we loved it…”
You can learn more about the KITE programme, Project HELIX and the ZERO2FIVE here.

Human Centred Design

Cardiff School of Technologies EUREKA Robotics Lab pilot new Covid-19 (coronavirus) testing at GP surgery

Academics at Cardiff Met’s Eureka Robotics Lab are joining the effort to slow the spread of Covid-19 (coronavirus) by using the latest robotics technology to pilot a system for identifying virus symptoms. Based at the University’s School of Technologies, the robotics team will use three Canbot U03S robots to help GPs on the front-line. Read more

Cardiff Met Student: Chloe Burgess (CSAD)

First-year BA (Hons) Fashion Design student, Chloe Burgess, from the Cardiff School of Art & Design (CSAD) has been making reusable facemasks for local care home workers during the COVID-19 lockdown. As part of her Fashion Design course, she has learned how to sew to industry standard and create and adapt sewing patterns. Chloe used these sewing skills to make 25 attractive and comfortable to wear protective face masks for the staff at Cherry Tree Care Home in Caldicot. The care home staff were pleased with Chloe’s innovative designs, as the disposable face masks they were initially using during the lockdown were expensive for everyday use. For Chloe, making the facemasks helped hone the sewing skills she learned during her Fashion Design course, and give her a creative outlet during the lockdown.

Chloe has now been offered money for material, the cost of the elastic, and her time to make more masks for people in her local area. She has begun to sell the masks online through her Cutesews business Facebook page. You can read more about Chloe’s community project here and contact Chloe for more details at st20151259@outlook.cardiffmet.ac.uk.

Our Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic