The kick-off meeting of the new H2020 project NIGHTINGALE, coordinated by our group, took place on October 26-27 in Athens.
NIGHITINGALE aspires to develop, extensively test and validate a Novel InteGrated toolkit for enhanced pre-Hospital life support and Triage IN challenGing And Large Emergencies, bringing together a large consortium of 23 partners from 11 EU member states, with strong end-user participation.
In a world where disasters and crises also evolve and cross boundaries with speed and ease , their complexity and magnitude increase, and societal repercussions often reach severe scales, it is imperative to increase citizens’ upkeep and feeling of safety and provide affected people the top-level healthcare that modern technology and current civil protection systems can offer. However, today’s emergency medical services and non-medical civil protection practitioners in a mass casualty incident scene, striving to save lives and nursing the injured, often have to rely on complicated or even outdated procedures (multiple protocols or lack of homogeneity in response methods and guidelines) and technology of the past. NIGHTINGALE will develop, integrate, test, deploy, demonstrate and validate a Novel Integrated Toolkit for Emergency Medical Response (NIT-MR) which ensures an upgrade to Pre-hospital life support and Triage.
This will comprise a multitude of tools, services and applications required for 1) upgrading evaluation of injured and affected population and handle casualties (Triage) by offering them the means to perform digital identification, allow traceability, support fast diagnosis and prognosis and continuous monitoring and enable accurate classification of medical condition; 2) optimising pre-hospital life support and damage control through AI-based tracking, tracing, routing and utilisation enhancements of assets, resources and capacities as well as enabling continuous monitoring and correlation of vital signs and actions; 3) allowing shared response across emergency medical services, non-medical civil protection personnel, volunteers and citizens. The NIT-MR is provided at the service of the emergency medical services, non-medical civil protection personnel, volunteers and citizens for extensive testing, training and validation in the framework of a rich Training and Validation Programme of 5 Round Tables, 3 TTXs, 1 Laboratory Integration and 3 FSXs.
ICCS has the role of project coordinator, while leading the work package related to the upgrading of procedures and tools for victim / patient triaging and the further development of digital systems, applications and wearable devices that support this process. During the Kick off Meeting of the project Dr. Eleftherios Ouzounoglou, Dr. Dimitra Dionysiou and Marilena Xarcha presented the overall picture of the project as well as issues related to Project Management, consortium collaboration tools and Administrative/Financial Issues.
