The University of Sussex has won at this year’s Higher Education Business Continuity Network (HEBCoN) annual awards, in the category of Covid Pandemic Response.

HEBCoN has more than 100 member institutions across the UK, and a number of members overseas. It is the second year in a row we have received the award for our response to the pandemic, and the third year in a row for winning business continuity and incident response awards from HEBCoN.

Vice-Chancellor, David Maguire, commented: “Congratulations to every one of our colleagues on campus who helped us achieve this award for the second year.

“The award, for our response to the Delta outbreak in June 2021, is testament to the quality of the work the team continues to do on Covid response.

“Many people have been involved, including our Covid lead Bridget Edminson and our Covid Steering Group: Ben Toogood, Alistair Hardwick, Caroline Lehany, Jayne Townsend, Scott Noble and Chloe Ratcliffe Schofield.

“Thank you to everyone who contributed across the University for your hard work and collaboration during such a challenging time."

HEBCoN recognised that our response to a sudden rise in Covid-19 cases among our students in early June 2021 (flagged through our HEBCoN award winning online Covid Reporting System), helped slow the spread of the virus to other areas of the community and shorten the duration of the outbreak.

Coming at the end of term, and in the midst of the assessment period, the increase in cases caused concern among students. We moved quickly to notify our public health partners and invoke our local Outbreak Plan, making additional testing units, testing kits and support available on campus. Contact tracing and transmission mapping were also stepped up for affected students, allowing us to take action that helped to minimise further transmission.

At the same time, we worked with the campus GPs’ surgery and local NHS Trust to bring a pop-up vaccination clinic to campus before the end of term. This saw 1,700 students receive their first dose before leaving at the end of the academic year and before their age-group had been called nationally.

The judging panel considered that our submission stood out because of the speed of our response in exceptional circumstances and the way we proactively liaised with local partners in the early stages of the outbreak.

Our colleagues worked closely with Brighton and Hove City Council Public Health Team and City Leadership Team, the local Health Protection Team at Public Health England (now UKSHA), local NHS partners and the University of Brighton, supporting a strong community effort to respond effectively to the outbreak.