Safety Region

The Medical Assistance Organization in the Region (GHOR) is part of the safety region. GHOR is responsible for leadership and coordination in the event of a disaster or crisis that impacts public health. GHOR is not an emergency service. GHOR ensures that in the case of major accidents and disasters, various medical organizations—such as ambulances, hospitals, general practitioners, and public health services (GGD)—together form one relief chain. Additionally, during emergencies, coordination is established with police, fire services, and municipalities, and the GHORs of multiple safety regions collaborate when scaling up is important.

There are processes in place for collecting and sharing information, and an online tool is used for this purpose. However, there was a need and opportunity for improvement both in content (what information and how to share it) and in the process (how do we implement changes). For instance, by sharing certain information at an even earlier stage to be able to respond even more effectively in the event of emergencies. Another factor was that, in the long run, the control rooms of five safety regions would merge into one control room (this was realized in early 2023).

The goals of this project were:

• Create 2 workshops with scenario's about large scale emergency situations that have to do with health, and help the participants to come up with ways to handle them
• Create a roadmap that shows the collaborative steps that need to be taken to get to the desired situations
• Use the Science2Design4Society approach
• Create a innovation expedition that shows how to respond to certain emergency situations (such as a flu outbreak)

The GHOR has requested the DesignLab of the University of Twente (DL) to provide a good overview of the current situation for partners in the healthcare sector: hospitals, public health, general practitioners, and ambulance services. With an understanding of the current situation, they make decisions based on the exact number of victims and the real impact on public health. In February and June 2019, DL facilitated two workshops that took place on the following topics:

Workshop 1: How do we ideally want to collect and share information? What does this mean for the role of GHOR in the five safety regions? Where will GHOR be in five years, and what general steps need to be taken to get there? The case study involved a large-scale flu outbreak.

Workshop 2: What does the central control room of the future ideally look like? How do we ensure even better coordination between the Regional Ambulance Service and GHOR in this regard?

The participants were very pleased with the workshops, because it gave them the skills and knowledge to act on certain emergency situations. The collaboration between the participants and DesignLab was very important and impactful, because they have not experienced this kind of session or this way of thinking before.