Support staff
"The support staff at the Department of Public Health assists the scientific staff with (HR) administration, IT, housing and project management."
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic challenged us to support the scientific personnel in working from home, while also adjusting ourselves to this new way of working. We quickly familiarized ourselves with online meeting tools, and organized activities and gifts to uphold the 'department's spirit’ and social cohesion, such as by an online reception including mailed-out drink and snack boxes. At the same time, IT prepared the department with the necessary equipment for ‘hybrid’ meetings. As many research activities were put on hold, the EU project support office assisted with applying for the necessary project extensions, while facilitating remote project meetings.
Highlights
of Support staff in 2020
Implementation of research management system ‘PaNaMa’
Research Support Office
PaNaMa was implemented at the Erasmus MC in 2020. It is a Research Management System for studies involving human subjects. PaNaMa supports users in performing a human-centered study by offering structured workflows and tasks, initially for studies subject to the Medical Research Involving Human Subjects Act (WMO), but ultimately also for non-WMO and Population Screening Act (WBO) studies.
With guidance from the PaNaMa team, the Research Support Office migrated all studies of the Department of Public Health into PaNaMa. There was also the opportunity to take a first glance into PaNaMa during PaNaMa courses at MGZ in the summer of 2020. The goal is that every new study will be registered in PaNaMa resulting in one central overview of all MGZ studies. In the end, PaNaMa has to be the standard system for all procedures that will ensure scientific integrity and compliance with the relevant laws, like WMO, GDPR and WBO. These procedures include, amongst others: Medical Ethical Committee applications, privacy risk assessments, maintaining the Data Management Plan to archiving the project files.
New public website
Secretariat
In 2020 we launched a new public website. The website provides a snapshot of our activities related to research, education and societal impact. At the secretariat we regularly add the latest news updates and calendar items to the site. We also contribute to Twitter updates, which are shared on the homepage of the website. We keep developing the website, including as the latest addition our personal webpages, where all employees can have their own online profile for networking purposes.
