Ripples, Echoes and Fractures: The ongoing impact of Covid 19 on the work we do

OPUS Study Day

Ripples, Echoes and Fractures:

The ongoing impact of Covid 19 on the work we do and the individuals and organisations we work with

Saturday 9 May 2026

2 pm to 5 pm  GMT – (UK Time)

Only by Zoom

We invite you to a study day on the ongoing impact of COVID-19 on work and organisational life. This workshop aims to create a space within which to reflect on and remember the COVID-19 pandemic, consider its ongoing impacts, both visible and invisible, known and unknown, and their significance for the work we do, and consider how we locate COVID within that work in a context of ongoing turbulence. The session will allow for exploration of the lingering impact of Covid on personal resilience and organisational health, our own and our clients’, and the systems we work in and with.

Stories will be used to illustrate Covid impacts at individual, role, and systems levels, including a model of the stages of psychological impact of Covid as described in The Covid Trail (1). The facilitator will share how this experience of writing about her Covid work deepened her awareness of the personal impact of consulting to organisations in this deep crisis.

This will allow the group to consider some of the invisible impacts of COVID in their work, the challenge of how to safely articulate them using their own stories, and then reflect on how they attend to their own needs for containment in online, disconnected times. The process and content of recently concluded pieces of consultancy work will be shared to illustrate the challenge. The ripples and echoes created by this opaque crisis will be threaded through the workshop, and the question posed is that some of the fractures caused to organisations by Covid cannot be fully articulated, as there has been no subsequent safe ground. The contribution of the pandemic to an acceleration of organisational unravelling will be explored in the context of considering where now to find safe ground upon which to locate our work.

(1) Wren, B. (2023) Despair and Endurance: The experience of NHs staff during the Covid Crisis. In Brunning, H. and Khaleelee, O. (Eds) The Covid Trail, Psychodynamic Explorations. Phoenix Publishing House.