Wellbeing’s Q4 2020 newsletter, mailed in the closing weeks of December 2020, covered a year that asked unusual questions of every organisation operating in the clinical and research space. The newsletter was deliberately shorter than the issues that preceded it. There was less to say of the kind Wellbeing normally writes about, and more of what was happening that year did not lend itself easily to written communication.
Clinical relationships paused and restarted across the year. The clinicians Wellbeing worked with were, in most cases, redirected toward urgent COVID-19 care during the year’s most intense periods. Patient appointments that had been scheduled months in advance were rescheduled, sometimes more than once. Wellbeing’s position throughout this period was that the priority belonged to urgent and severe care, and that elective and research-stage work would resume on the clinic’s own timeline. That timeline varied significantly by region and by institution.
Laboratory work continued where it could and adapted where it could not. Wellbeing’s research partnerships through 2020 were affected by the same kinds of operational constraints that affected academic and clinical research generally during the pandemic. Some lines of work paused. Others continued in modified form, with smaller teams, longer experimental cycles, and tighter prioritisation. The work that mattered most got done. The work that could wait, waited.
Patient communication moved largely online through the year. Wellbeing’s contact with patients in the programme, which had previously been a mix of in-person visits, correspondence, and occasional travel, became almost entirely written and video-based. For many patients this was a meaningful change. Wellbeing’s working position then, as now, was that the relationship between Wellbeing and each patient is what carries the programme. That relationship adapted to the constraints of the year. It did not weaken.
The newsletter included short reflections from members of the team on what the year had been like from the inside. Andrew Chancellor wrote about the operational reality of running an international research-led foundation through a global health crisis. Dr Steve Ray wrote about the laboratory side and the practical adaptations the science had to make. Max Lewinsohn’s chairman’s note framed the year as one of resilience rather than triumph, and looked ahead to 2021 with the realism the year had taught everyone.
Worth noting candidly, 2020 was also the year in which several things Wellbeing had been thinking about quietly for a long time started crystallising into specific research and operational decisions. The transition in Wellbeing’s research programme toward its current cell-source basis was one of these. The decisions were not made because of the pandemic, but they were partly enabled by a year in which the constant pressure of routine operations had eased enough to allow for considered reorientation. Most organisations that came through 2020 in good shape can point to similar moments.
The Q4 2020 newsletter is the last of the early-period newsletters preserved in Wellbeing’s public archive. Through 2021 to 2023 Wellbeing’s public communication was less consistent. Some of that reflected the broader operational environment. Some of it reflected internal restructuring and the time the team spent on the research and clinical work itself rather than on writing about it.
For readers reviewing the public archive sequentially, this issue is a useful pause point. Wellbeing that emerges from 2020 is the recognisable predecessor of the current Wellbeing. The newsletter is available on request, with the caveat that it documents a year that is, even now, hard to write about cleanly.