The University of Oxford is the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the world’s second oldest surviving university. While its exact founding date is unknown, there is evidence that teaching took place as far back as 1096.

Located in and around Oxford’s medieval city centre, the university comprises 44 colleges and halls, and over 100 libraries, making it the largest library system in the UK.

Students number around 22,000 in total, just over half of whom are undergraduates while over 40 per cent are international, representing 140 countries between them.

Called the "city of dreaming spires" by Victorian poet, Matthew Arnold, Oxford has the youngest population of any city in England and Wales: nearly a quarter of its residents are university students, which gives Oxford a noticeable buzz.

Oxford has an alumni network of over 250,000 individuals, including more than 120 Olympic medalists, 26 Nobel Prize winners, seven poets laureate, and over 30 modern world leaders (Bill Clinton, Aung San Suu Kyi, Indira Gandhi and 26 UK Prime Ministers, among them).

The university is associated with 11 winners of the Nobel Prize in chemistry, five in physics and 16 in medicine. Notable Oxford thinkers and scientists include Tim Berners-Lee, Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins. The actor Hugh Grant also went to Oxford, as did the writers Oscar Wilde, Graham Greene, Vikram Seth and Philip Pullman.

Oxford’s first international student, named Emo of Friesland, was enrolled in 1190, while the modern day university prides itself on having an ‘international character’ with connections to almost every country in the world and 40% of its faculty drawn from overseas.

As a modern, research-driven university, Oxford has numerous strengths but cites prowess in the sciences, having recently ranked number one in the world for medicine (Click to see ranking) (if its medical sciences division was a university in its own right, it would be the fourth largest in the UK) and among the top ten universities globally for life sciences, physical sciences, social sciences, and the arts and humanities.

The experience of the last two years has been extraordinary for every health and care system across the world and the English experience is no exception. We have seen major loss of life, directly from Covid and for people who could not access care for other conditions. Tragically, many people reached the end of their life without the support of loved ones as they had to be treated in isolation. Some groups within our population were disproportionately affected. We learned hard lessons about the importance of social care. Many health and care staff were themselves ill or died. The impact on our workforce has been, and continues to be, profound. And the long-term effects of surviving Covid are still not fully clear. There is a great deal to sadden us about this period.

However, we also saw a remarkable response from our services. A range of extraordinary innovations were introduced, at unparalleled pace and scale. Collaboration between parts of the service, with other industrial sectors such as engineering, with academia and across countries occurred at an unprecedented level. The UK played a leading role in vaccine development, and in innovations to identify variants of the virus and to track and model the epidemic. Health service delivery has changed profoundly, and we now have to evaluate how many of these changes should become part of our future.

As the numbers of new cases reduces, and the day-to-day impact on our wards and ICUs from Covid itself diminishes, the service is deeply engaged in addressing how to deal with the backlog of demand which was pent up during the pandemic and the cost of these backlog demand. And this is happening as the service in England undergoes a major shift in philosophy. For thirty years, competition in an “internal market” has been the orthodox policy for the improvement of quality and efficiency of services. From July 2022 new reforms are being enacted in which collaboration between stakeholders will replace competition as the dominant philosophy.

During this programme, we will discuss these issues, with input from people who have been involved from all parts of the health and care sector. As always there will be an opportunity for participants to present innovation inspired by Covid in their own countries in the "Poster Sessions and Round Table". We hope and intend that this workshop will give space and inspiration for you to reflect on the implications of the last two years for your own work and your own services, as the world takes its tentative steps towards reopening its doors.