Biomedical and clinical engineers’ contribution during pandemics toward global health

This session will guide the students through some cases studies that shows the contribution of Biomedical and clinical engineers during the pandemic. COVID-19 pandemic showed that no country in the world was prepared for this significant health threat. High-income countries found themselves in low-resource settings condition: in addition to a scarcity of medical devices and patients’ beds in intensive care units, there was a major lack of PPE. Despite the great effort of several manufacturers to readdress their production lines to contribute to increasing the availability of PPE worldwide, the PPE regulatory frameworks proved to be inadequate and slowed down the COVID-19 response. This impasse was overcome thanks to the derogation deliberated by the EU commission. Furthermore, the WHO activated the R&D blueprint (focused also on PPE) to accelerate and coordinate the R&D process as well as the creation of novel norms and standards, led by scientists and global health professionals.