Fernando Simón and Margarita del Val, two of the experts who have set the tone for Spanish public opinion on the coronavirus in recent years, together with doctors such as Pedro Cavadas, will analyze how to deal with pandemics. Both will coincide in Valencia, the city that will host this next International Summit on Pandemic Management, which is part of the STAMINA European project, developed by the Local Police. The meeting, organized by the Citizen Protection Area, will be attended by 38 organizations representing 19 countries.
The conference will be attended by specialists such as the director of the Center for Coordination of Health Alerts and Emergencies of the Ministry of Health, Fernando Simón, or the researcher of the Higher Council for Scientific Research Margarita del Val.
Likewise, the director of the European Commission’s Emergency Office, Anne Simon, and the representative of the European Office of the World Health Organization, Miranda Ngoc, will also participate, among others, the Valencia City Council has indicated in a statement .
The summit will begin next Tuesday, May 17, with a pilot test in the Clock Building, where the tools developed will be tested, validated, and evaluated, simulating critical situations in a real environment, and will continue the following day with a discussion forum in which experts and high-level experts will present the lessons learned from the current coronavirus crisis and outline how to deal with future pandemics.
This international summit will make it possible to check the progress of STAMINA and the main tools developed within the framework of the project to help managers and participants in pandemics to coordinate properly and make the best decisions.
The summit will serve as “the culmination” of two years of “intense” collaborative work on the matter, in which it has been shown that police forces, ministries of health, universities, hospitals, researchers, companies, administrations and many other entities in Europe and third countries “can collaborate successfully in the face of common challenges”.
The fact that the summit is entirely face-to-face, although it will also be broadcast live on YouTube, and that the capacity of 160 “first level” participants is expected to be completed, is meant to symbolize, highlights the consistory, “the overcoming of the most critical phase of the current pandemic”, as well as “the solidity of the preparation for eventual pandemics in the future”.
STAMINA ‘Prediction and Management of Major Health Emergencies’ is a European project funded by the European Commission within the framework of the Horizon 2020 Program, which aims to develop intelligent tools to support decision-making with an interface based on maps and different layers of information, aimed at the first stages of emergency management.
The STAMINA toolkit will be accompanied by guidelines for the effective implementation of risk communication principles and best practices in inter-organizational preparedness and response plans.
The Councilor for Citizen Protection, Aarón Cano, has highlighted the importance of Valencia hosting this first international meeting because “we have to begin to draw lessons, to examine the effectiveness of the measures that each country promoted in the different phases of the pandemic and draw conclusions that can be very useful to apply to the management of future pandemics”.
“If the coronavirus pandemic has taught us anything, it is that we are facing a global challenge that has had significant repercussions on security, on our societies, our economy, which is why it is so important that we share experiences,” he said.
Cano stressed that it is the first meeting held in the world where officials and experts from numerous countries will participate in person.
“Fortunately we are not in the same situation as we were a while ago, that is why it is time to start learning from the lessons that this pandemic has taught us, to examine the measures we have adopted and assess their effectiveness because at that time we had a great lack of knowledge. Today we have learned many things that can help us in the future”, he concluded.
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