Research Reflection: Moving research forward during COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to major shifts in the healthcare environment, including the conduct of health research. Oncology practice has been significantly affected by abrupt measures to minimize COVID-19 exposure to cancer patients, family caregivers, and healthcare providers, such as social distancing, shifts to telehealth, redeployment and staffing changes, implementation of visitor restrictions, and round-the-clock use of personal protective equipment (Duncan et al., 2021). Efforts to minimize the risk of COVID-19 transmission also resulted in significant reductions in enrolling cancer patients in clinical trials in the early stages of the pandemic, especially for non-interventional studies (Tolaney et al., 2020; Waterhouse et al., 2020).