Dear Breathing Together family,
Alongside you, we are experiencing profound change, on both personal and professional levels.
As a study team, we are deeply committed to carrying out the mission of Breathing Together. It remains vital to understand how the airways work and what differences there are at birth and how these differences change after exposure to things like allergens, pollution, and yes, infections. And CoVID19 does not diminish the importance of the study.
With our mission in mind, there are some changes that must be made to the way Breathing Together moves forward.
We will be unable to see you and your child in person for follow-up visits until further notice. This not only reduces the risk to you and your families (no need for visitors to your home or for travel to public areas) it allows our research nurses and consultants to become 100% committed to their roles in the NHS, where they are needed now more than ever before.
As a result, we aim to send you the 3-year questionnaire by email and/or text message link, in the same way that we send out the short monthly questionnaires. Please help us by filling it in; we know this is a troubling time, but we so want to keep our momentum (that you have created) going.
In order to best work with you, Mindy, our study manager, will become your point of contact for any questions related to the study. This allows all our nurses to remain committed full time to their roles within the NHS. Feel free to phone, text, email, we can even Skype or FaceTime if you just need to see a face other than your own every now and then! Contact details are available here.
We will continue to move forward with analysis of the information and samples that we have already collected, and we will continue to make the best use of this time, and we aim see you in person again as soon as it is safe to do so. We will also be in touch with our funder, the Wellcome Trust, to make sure we access whatever funding we need to cover the losses Coronaviruses have inflicted on us.
We are so very grateful for your continued support and contribution to the study. We are all down, but we are absolutely not out, nor will we be.
For and on behalf of all the Breathing Together research team,
Andy (Chief Investigator) and Mindy (Study Manager)