RESERVIST EU Horizon 2020
Project Launched: Towards a Rapid Manufacturing Response to Spikes in Medical Products and Services Demand
Vaassen, the Netherlands, December 3rd, 2020. Hospitainer, manufacturer of rapid mobile healthcare solutions, is a partner of RESERVIST, a Horizon 2020 project starting today. Hospitainer , together with the other European partners, aims to repurpose manufacturing lines to respond to crisis needs.
December 1st 2020
Today, the HORIZON 2020 project RESERVIST starts. The 17 European partners, representative of both the industry and research sector, began planning their activities to achieve an ambitious goal. They aim to establish a network of ‘reservist cells’ to activate surge manufacturing when standard production lines cannot respond to the demand for medical products.
The need for similar structures became apparent earlier this year when the health systems faced considerable challenges in provisioning medical supplies, e.g. personal protective equipment, ventilators etc. This made it difficult to provide healthcare to millions of EU citizens, in turn.
In response to this reality, RESERVIST aims to create a network that provides continuous manufacturing and service in the healthcare supply chain during emergencies. To achieve that, industry and research partners will work together to build cross-sectoral networks and tap into the worldwide maker community.
“RESERVIST is a great opportunity to improve the resilience of production lines, enabling the industry to respond to fluctuations in market demand in case of an emergency or other trigger events”, said Guy Buyle, Manager EU Research at Centexbel, the lead partner of RESERVIST.
RESERVIST’s main legacy will be a network of partners able to repurpose production lines to provide personal protection, respiratory and medical disinfection equipment to the health system. Easier said than done, however. Partners will establish the backbone network and set up a coordination system to ensure efficient logistics and aligned manufacturing in case of emergency. Meanwhile, partners will develop new materials and tweak production facilities, including rapid testing and certification capacities for the resulting products. The network backbone will be eventually embedded into the partners’ structure, remaining idle until activation is necessary.
To reach its ambitious goal, RESERVIST relies on each partner’s expertise. Hospitainer brings its knowledge in manufacturing mobile field hospitals that are rapidly deployable. Hospitainer will contribute to RESERVIST by sharing expertise and experience, by sharing scenario development, preparing a demo case and creating designs for bigger constructions for different scenarios. Hospitainer will share expertise form field experience, do’s and don’ts and requirements from the field.
The RESERVIST consortium includes four large enterprises and seven SMEs, in addition to four research centres and two innovation networks. The intersectoral nature of the project also emerges from the disciplines of the partners’ expertise, that range from healthcare, textiles, manufacturing and engineering to digitalisation, design, certification, software platforms and modelling.
About RESERVIST
The RESERVIST project is co-funded by the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Union under grant agreement n°101016041. It will last 24 months and started on December 1, 2020. RESERVIST has a consortium of 17 partners from 7 EU countries and is coordinated by Centexbel, the Belgian research centre for textiles and plastics.
For more information, please contact
Peter Hazendonk
COO at Hospitainer
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