"“Technology is not to be feared. It is only to be understood."" Much is possible in our century. ICT is bound to revolutionize the healthcare landscape for the better. A digital & technological revolution takes place and the medical world can profit. The EU has a growing shortage of Care workers due to an ageing population. The challenge is to find, educate and train those in and outside vocational education, who do not have sufficient skills for these challenging developments yet. What is and can be developed in IT to (en)lighten the healthcare worker? The gap between health industry (demand) and education (availability) and IT (solutions) is large.What does the care sector need? How can digital systems reduce the workload? How can we train more people in a continious cycle? This application looks at the opportunities and challenges in VET education within the care and IT domain in our regions. Changing and adapting existing systems takes time, effort and trust. By joining our forces, combining our knowledge and experiences, we ensure initial and continuous education in the care sector is future proof. Through (re)educating and applying new IT possibilities together in healthcare, the pressure on healthcare decreases, studying and working in health care will become more attractive and clients will be happier.This CoVE combines regional excellence with international cooperation and industry, IT innovation with sharing knowledge in VET. We exchange students, staff and experts. We build innovative educational programmes, valorised through microcredentials and we share knowledge through an European platform of Vocational Excellence in HealthTech. Through work-based learning, online lessons, working with industry and policymakers, we ensure the education we deliver together is up-to-date, and accessible for all. So, a new generation of European health care students/ workers will be trained and educated to face this challenge."

In a world where disasters and crises also evolve and cross boundaries with speed and ease , their complexity and magnitude increase, and societal repercussions often reach severe scales, it is imperative to increase citizens’ upkeep and feeling of safety and provide affected people the top-level healthcare that modern technology and current civil protection systems can offer. However, today’s emergency medical services and non-medical civil protection practitioners in a mass casualty incident scene, striving to save lives and nursing the injured, often have to rely on complicated or even outdated procedures (multiple protocols or lack of homogeneity in response methods and guidelines) and technology of the past. NIGHTINGALE will develop, integrate, test, deploy, demonstrate and validate a Novel Integrated Toolkit for Emergency Medical Response (NIT-MR) which ensures an upgrade to Pre-hospital life support and Triage. This will comprise a multitude of tools, services and applications required for 1) upgrading evaluation of injured and affected population and handle casualties (Triage) by offering them the means to perform digital identification, allow traceability, support fast diagnosis and prognosis and continuous monitoring and enable accurate classification of medical condition; 2) optimising pre-hospital life support and damage control through AI-based tracking, tracing, routing and utilisation enhancements of assets, resources and capacities as well as enabling continuous monitoring and correlation of vital signs and actions; 3) allowing shared response across emergency medical services, non-medical civil protection personnel, volunteers and citizens. The NIT-MR is provided at the service of the emergency medical services, non-medical civil protection personnel, volunteers and citizens for extensive testing, training and validation in the framework of a rich Training and Validation Programme of 5 Round Tables, 3 TTXs, 1 Laboratory Integration and 3 FSXs.