PREparedness and PAndemic REsponse
in Deutschland

Associated consortium

Project content and objectives

The goal of PREPARED is to develop a concept for a scientifically sound, collaborative, adaptive, and sustainable infrastructure for pandemic preparedness and management by the University Medicine. This will ensure coordinated, expeditious, targeted, and evidence-based action and response to threats to patient care and public safety in the current and future states of pandemic, as well as coordinated research in the current and future state of pandemics on priority issues. Our vision is a future in which university medicine provides coordinated, efficient, transparent, evidence-based and agile medical care in crisis situations, answers urgent questions in a scientifically sound manner, and provides appropriate advice and information to politicians and the public.

Challenges

The challenge lies in the necessary bundling, organization and coordination of clinical and scientific expertise in order to ensure rapid, evidence-based and coordinated medical care in future pandemics and crises and to be able to answer questions from politics, clinical practice and society quickly and in the best possible way. questions from politics, clinics and society. This requires the bundling and structured integration of as many perspectives, expertises and actors as possible. In addition, there are different regional structures and requirements that must be taken into account in the concept development. PREPARED therefore aims to identify the need for a nationally uniform and regionally flexible pandemic management system that can react flexibly to the course of infections and prevent the health care system from being overburdened. In cooperation with the Robert Koch Institute and other national and international partners, PREPARED thus aims to contribute to German and European pandemic preparedness and prevention.

Added value

PREPARED integrates concepts and results from the predecessor projects egePan Unimed (development, testing and implementation of regionally adaptive care structures and processes for evidence-led pandemic management), B-FAST (Nationwide Research Network – Applied Surveillance and Testing) and CEOsys (COVID-19 Evidence Ecosystem). A Rapid (Re)action and Response Platform (R3-Hub) will enable rapid and coordinated preparation, action and response by university hospitals. In close networking with national and international partners, current and future pandemics – always in collaboration with institutional partners such as the Robert Koch Institute – can thus be effectively and jointly combated. PREPARED contributes to (a) high-quality crisis-proof patient care, (b) cooperative evidence generation and synthesis, (c) consecutive derivation of actionable recommendations, and (d) implementation in the care setting. The outcome of the project will be a holistic concept for pandemic preparedness, including a platform for sharing expertise on future pathogens, prioritizing research topics, developing agile and expeditious actions in the event of a pandemic, and evaluating them through knowledge synthesis and transfer. The main pillars and quality criteria of the PREPARED infrastructure to be established are interdisciplinarity, integration of clinical and scientific expertise, appropriateness of scientific methods, transparency and cooperativeness with national, international and regional partners.

Project structure

Within the framework of ten work packages (WP), an inter- and multidisciplinary consortium with partners from all 36 national university hospitals, consisting of clinically active physicians with scientists, project managers and other relevant actors, is working together on a strategic or operational level, thus pooling a broad scientific and clinical expertise of university medicine. In addition, PREPARED cooperates with various external partners from non-university institutions that are of high importance for pandemic management.

The central structural unit will be the PREPARED Hub, a transparent and networked management entity to be developed in WP1 together with the Robert Koch Institute, which will integrate and functionally bundle the critical components and best practice results to be developed in the various other APs (2-10). This will incorporate findings on population surveillance, infection prevention, and hospital hygiene (WP2), testing strategies (WP3), patient safety and clinical risk management (WP4), modeling and risk stratification (WP5), evidence synthesis (WP6), rapid derivation of recommendations for action (WP7), clinical and regional implementation of pandemic management recommendations (WP8), employee health (WP9), and human resource management (WP10) into the pandemic preparedness concept to be developed. To ensure sustainability of the concept, rulebooks, SOPs, protocols, and curricula will be developed and made available to the NUM network. The development will be accompanied by other NUM projects and a joint use case with the NUM project COVerCHILD (also 2nd funding line) in a cooperative manner and tested for suitability and feasibility.

Project responsibles

Prof. Dr. med. Jochen Schmitt

Head of the Center for Evidence-Based Health Care (ZEGV) University Hospital and Medical Faculty of the TU Dresden

Prof. Dr. med. Simone Scheithauer

Head of the Institute for Hospital Hygiene and Infectiology (IK&I), Göttingen University Medical Center