The COVID-19 pandemic has underlined the critical need for protecting European Union (EU) Member State (MS) healthcare infrastructures. Sufficient resource availability (e.g. hospital beds, healthcare staff, personal protective equipment and medical support devices) is vital to ensure an efficient response to cross-border health threats. Likewise, as demonstrated by the interdependence and vulnerabilities of healthcare infrastructures exposed during COVID-19, such responses require strengthening of EU cross-border capacities.

PANDEM-2 is developing innovations in preparedness planning and situational awareness IT tools to enhance EU MS capacity to respond to emerging health threats on an intersectoral and cross-border basis thus reducing potential interruption to vital healthcare infrastructure.

This is achieved through:

• Development of a training platform which becomes operational in times of health emergencies. This includes:
  • a coherent pandemic-management database which captures, normalises and integrates heterogenous health surveillance data from multiple open sources (global, EU, national). To support situational awareness and evidence-based decision making by planners and policy makers at a national and cross-border basis, these data can be queried and analysed via the PANDEM-2 dashboard.
  • modelling tools to assess resource capacity (e.g. hospital beds, ventilators etc) and workforce readiness, to respond to different health threats on a subnational, national, and EU-wide basis.
  • Cross-border pandemic response training and simulation exercises for implementation as large scale demonstrators within EU MS Public Health Emergency Operating Centres to strengthen cross border pandemic
• Development of risk communication tools to support real time exchange of information and advice between public health agencies, healthcare providers, first responders and communities affected by cross-border health threats.
• Improving biosecurity and biosafety through the development of a toolkit with guidelines, protocols and resources on biosafety and biosecurity for first responders, clinical staff and laboratory personnel during cross-border responses.