Health and care
Within the EMRIC partnership, both ambulance services and hospitals work together to provide the best possible assistance to citizens. Around 900 cross-border ambulance deployments per year and agreements and information exchange between hospitals make the Euregio Meuse-Rhine a unique region in Europe. In addition to hospitals and ambulance deployments, EMRIC also facilitates cooperation between the services responsible for infectious diseases. Viruses do not stop at the border. This makes the sharing of information crucial to prevent the spread of infectious diseases.
Emergency number 112
Wherever you are within the Euregio Meuse-Rhine, always call 112 in an emergency. If you are using a mobile phone and you are in a border area, foreign network reception may cause your 112 call to be routed to a dispatch center in a neighbouring country. The EMRIC cooperation ensures that the call is forwarded to a dispatch center in the region where you are located. They will then send the fastest ambulance to the scene.
More information about the dispatch centers in the Meuse-Rhine Euregion and how they work together can be found here.
Ambulance care
During medical emergencies, treatment is often so urgent that an ambulance must be sent immediately. In border regions, a foreign ambulance may arrive faster than an ambulance from your own country. However, due to differences in legislation and regulations, it is not evident that ambulances are allowed to cross the border. Thanks to the efforts of EMRIC, foreign ambulances within the Meuse-Rhine Euregion can cross the border in these cases to quickly provide the necessary care. In total, more than 900 ambulances cross the border within the Meuse-Rhine Euregio every year, which is about 2-3 per day.
Hospitals
Based on the urgency and the patient's condition and wishes, an ambulance chooses the hospital that can provide the best care for the patient. A few examples:
- The hospitals within the Meuse-Rhine Euregion work together to guarantee high-quality care for trauma victims; they do this within the German Trauma Network DGU;
- Dutch burns patients are generally taken to the Uniknikum in Aachen, as this is closer than the Dutch burns center in Beverwijk;
- A child from the Tongeren or Genk region who needs to be cared for in the intensive care unit of a hospital is taken to Maastricht UMC in a specially equipped ambulance.
EMRIC ensures that those responsible for the emergency departments within the Euregio Meuse-Rhine exchange information about their working methods, share best practices and discuss past incidents to improve care. In addition, agreements have been made within the EMRIC collaboration about the distribution of casualties during large-scale incidents. This distribution among the hospitals within the region is based on the hospital capacity and the patient's requirements for care (specialisms).
In short, the EMRIC collaboration ensures that patients are treated in the most suitable hospital, hospitals can learn from each other and that hospital capacities in the Meuse-Rhine Euregion are fully utilized.
Infectious diseases
Timely detection and control of infectious diseases is very important to prevent further spread. In a border region like the Meuse-Rhine Euroregion where large numbers of people cross national borders every day, a local outbreak of an infectious disease can quickly have international consequences. Each region that is part of the Meuse-Rhine Euroregion has its own public authority responsible for local infectious disease control. They carry out source and contact investigations, provide information and, if necessary, take measures.
Within the Meuse-Rhine Euroregion, these authorities regularly share relevant information and cooperate closely when an infectious disease crosses or threatens to cross the national border. Common Euroregional notification agreements and outbreak protocols support this. In this way, spread in the Euroregion can be contained to keep the population healthy. This structural information exchange and cross-border cooperation is partly made possible by EMRIC.
- Examples of cooperation in the context of infectious disease control
Examples of cooperation in the context of infectious disease control include a report of a German measles patient who had been in a Dutch restaurant, a norovirus outbreak among Dutch schoolchildren with a source in Belgium, an meningococcal infection of a German student living in the Netherlands or a hepatitis A outbreak at a Belgian school also attended by Dutch children.
Major infectious disease outbreaks where information was exchanged within the Meuse-Rhine Euroregion are of course the Covid-19 pandemic from early 2020 to mid-2023, but also the EHEC epidemic in Germany (2011) and the Q fever epidemic in the Netherlands (2009).
In addition, in response to the Covid-19 control issues in the Euroregion, EMRIC worked on the Pandemric project, in which research was conducted to promote Euroregional cooperation in the event of a pandemic or large-scale outbreak of an infectious disease, a Euroregional dashboard was maintained and a weekly summary of measures was produced from the three countries.
How are the agreements made?
- Focus group Eumed
The Focus group Eumed, which exists since 2005, 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.
News and stories
Forest fire exercise Kreis Heinsberg
Two firefighter colleagues took part in a large-scale forest fire exercise in Kreis Heinsberg in April. Curious about their impressions? Read on below!
EMRIC Wildfires Network Day in Eupen
On 15 May, the first wildfires network day took place in Eupen. Firefighters from the three countries met there to share knowledge, experience and practical examples around tackling wildfires. Read a...
Meeting focus group Infectious diseases
On Wednesday 29 January 2025, the Infectious Disease Control Focus Group met at the Gesundheitsamt in Aachen. At this meeting, 19 members were present.