Major emergencies have become more frequent the last decades. They affect more and more people, challenging the healthcare sector and response and recovery agencies. It therefore 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medical services (EMS) and non-medical civil protection practitioners often have to rely on complicated or even outdated procedures and technology of the past. Disasters differ considerably in nature, time scale, geographic extent, perils and impacts, and emergency medical services and non-medical CP practitioners face a multitude of challenges. They often deal with limited resources and awareness, unpredictable amount of citizens in need of care whilst requiring numerous treatment protocols to set in place, extreme difficulties in collaboration and communication, time pressure and effort consuming procedures in uncharted surroundings. Armouring medical and public safety agencies with all the tools that modern technology has to offer towards a step change to pre-hospital life support and triage is of outmost importance.
NIGHTINGALE develops, integrates, tests and will deploy, demonstrate and validate a Novel Integrated Toolkit for EMS (NIT-MR), at the service of emergency medical services and non-medical civil protection agencies (fire brigades, police and search and rescue personnel, but also volunteers and citizens) which ensures an upgrade to Pre-hospital life support and Triage. This is achieved by delivering enhanced Operational Capacity to respond to mass casualty incidents complemented by the inclusion of commonly agreed methods and guidelines. 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 by augmenting their field of view, information sharing and communications between teams and with victims.
The NIT-MR provided at the service of the users for extensive testing, training and validation in the framework of a rich Training, Testing and Validation Programme – 3 Table-Top Exercises, Laboratory Integration Tests, 1 Small-Scale Field Test and 2 Full-Scale Field Validations – towards empowering the emergency medical response and handling of mass casualty incidents to its fullest.
