UK / Public Services
Informing the UK COVID-19 Inquiry
"Ipsos were able to inform the Inquiry’s recommendations and enable greater insights into people’s experiences of Covid-19 and the Government’s response to the pandemic."
Business issue
The UK Government set up an independent public inquiry to examine the UK’s response to and impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, and learn lessons for the future. Like other public inquiries, the inquiry will listen to the accounts of victims and their families, as well as seek to establish facts, find fault, and learn lessons. The inquiry aims at:
- Examining the public health response to the pandemic;
- Examining the response of the health and care sector to the pandemic;
- Examining the economic response to the pandemic, including government interventions;
- Learning lessons from the above.
The inquiry collects evidence from expert witnesses as well as the general public, through a public listening exercise, Every Story Matters, which encourages members of the public to submit testimony of their experiences of the pandemic.
The amount and variety of evidence collected posed an analytical challenge to the inquiry, needing to capture the depth of people’s pandemic experiences and turn these into an evidence base that would help the Inquiry make meaningful recommendations.
Our solution
Ipsos was appointed by the UK Covid-19 Inquiry to bring research and analysis expertise to the Inquiry. The Inquiry needed to capture the Ipsos used Natural Language Processing to review information provided to the UK Covid-19 Inquiry through a webform available on its website by over 50,000 members of the public. A mix of topic-modelling and query-based analysis was used to categorise information, which was then analysed by theme and used to inform a summary of experiences relevant to each module.
For more information on this case study, get in touch here.
Impact
These reports were submitted to each module team as evidence and will be used, alongside other evidence, to inform the Inquiry’s recommendations and enable greater insights into people’s experiences of Covid-19 and the Government’s response to the pandemic.
