On 18 May 2022, the STAMINA project partners and stakeholders came together in-person for the first time since the start of the project during the 1st International Summit on Pandemic Management in València (Spain), organised and hosted by the València Local Police.
This Summit aimed to be a forum for discussion and debate for high-level experts to present lessons learnt from the ongoing pandemic to share and discuss ways to apply these learning to be better prepared for and manage future health crises. During the Summit, representatives from the project consortium shared the STAMINA Project’s progress and demonstrated the usefulness of the STAMINA tools to help end-users better manage pandemics such as through bio-tools for rapid and accurate detection of pathogens. STAMINA partners also shared the importance of and ways to achieve a more coordinated effort among key stakeholders and decision makers through effective data exchanges between countries in the EU and beyond.
STAMINA’s 1st Summit was preceded by a pilot test and a stakeholder seminar on 17 May in the València Port Authority premises, where some of STAMINA tools developed were tested, validated and evaluated by simulating critical situations in the real world. Participants and attendees of the pilot test benefited in understanding the utility and efficacy of these tools to better manage health crises of the future.
The summit featured key stakeholders and experts in healthcare such as Anne Simon, Head of Emergency Office, Health Emergency Preparedness and Response General Directorate (HERA), European Commission, Miranda Ngoc, Reporting and Knowledge Management Officer, World Health Organisation Office (WHO) for Europe, as well as Ministry of Health, Emergency Health Response and Medical Research representatives from different European countries involved in the STAMINA Project.
One of the segments during the Summit brought together other healthcare EU-funded projects to being collaboration and cooperation between projects to strengthen policy influence and decision making during health crisis by finding synergies through discussion. The projects that were represented by the speakers include COVINFORM, STRATEGY, PERISCOPE, COVID-X and PANDEM-2 and all of these projects with several others form the PREPARE Cluster that is led by STAMINA.
At least 38 organisations from 19 EU and non-EU countries participated in the Summit, which marks the culmination of two years of intense collaborative work on the subject, demonstrating that police forces, health ministries, universities, hospitals, researchers, businesses, administrations and many other entities from Europe and non-EU countries can successfully collaborate in the face of a common challenge such as COVID-19.
TPEB CR was represented on the summit by Vanda Bostikova, Researcher at the Atlanta Center for Disease Control and Prevention(USA), Professor of Epidemiology at the Military University of the Czech Republic.