The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges further provided guidance in March 2020 outlining the importance of ensuring the training, competency and supervision of doctors before deployment outside their usual specialty or areas of expertise.5 It emphasized the advice that no doctor should undertake any duty that they do not feel comfortable to perform. For many ophthalmologists, redeployment was an unprecedented event. Therefore, we performed a survey open to all grades of ophthalmologists across the UK, irrespective of whether they were redeployed or not, to evaluate the processes, capture the experience and identify both the positive and negative aspects of redeployment. The survey had four main objectives: