In medical emergencies, emergency assistance is necessary to prevent a victim from dying or sustaining permanent injuries. In the Euregio Meuse-Rhine, this assistance can often be obtained faster from abroad than from one's own country. EMRIC ensures that this assistance is not hindered by state borders, but that every resident, tourist and passer-by in the EMR receives timely and adequate assistance.
The Focus Group Eumed
For this reason, the Focus Group Eumed has existed since 2005. This focus group deals with day-to-day cross-border cooperation as well as emergency assistance in large-scale incidents and disasters. The many cross-border deployments each year usually proceed silently and without problems thanks to years of investment in cooperation. Members of the Focus Group Eumed are the medical managers of the ambulance services in the EMR, the bodies responsible for ambulance care, and the heads of emergency departments of the hospitals involved.
Many doctors and staff have come to know and appreciate each other better, and thanks to exchanges on working methods on both sides of the border, the emergency response to serious incidents has been greatly simplified. Eumed focuses on mutual assistance in medical emergencies in the EMR. Cross-border assistance in the form of ambulance services and hospital care is thus a matter of course in the EMR.
The Eumed Plan
For assistance in large-scale incidents, the Focus Group Eumed created the so-called Eumed Plan. The plan defines the competences and capacities of the individual ambulance services and the distribution of injured persons among hospitals in the EMR in the event of major incidents. Furthermore, officers on duty and control rooms can find out from this plan how many hospital beds and which emergency care infrastructure the individual hospitals can make available in the event of cross-border incidents. This plan is updated regularly.
Safeguarding the agreements
The cooperation is secured by various public law agreements, which can be consulted on our website (only available in German, Dutch and French). The responsibility for securing the operational agreements lies with the cooperating organisations in Eumed.