From 21 to 25 September, the Agency provided support to the consequence management field exercise Ukraine 2015, organized by the Euro-Atlantic Disaster Response Coordination Centre (EADRCC) and the State Emergency Service (SES) of Ukraine.
Over 2000 participants from various international, regional and national civil or military consequence management teams of NATO and Partner Nations attended the exercise.
The field exercise aimed to train and exercise procedures for the Local Emergency Management Authority (LEMA), the UN model On-site Operation Co-ordination Centre (OSOCC) and liaison officers, as well as team leaders of participating consequence management teams. The NCI Agency deployed the Multinational Telemedicine System (MnTS) which allowed remote access to medical expertise in support of the exercise scenario.
Multinational Telemedicine System Project
The MnTS project is a multi-year effort funded by the NATO Science for Peace and Security (SPS)Programme. The project started in 2014 and will conclude in 2016. The project timeline includes concept design during the first year, prototyping and exercise support during the second year, and scaling up during the last year. The MnTS enables telemedicine to cross national borders, allowing the best medical specialists to engage in response to major disasters/incidents.
During the exercise, the MnTS technical platform was used to respond to incidents in real time, and to demonstrate connectivity and integration of multi-national systems and medical expertise. The exercise took part in a remote location and connectivity to national telemedicine centres was ensured exclusively by satellite communication. According to the exercise scenario, local hospitals were overwhelmed with the number of casualties, so remote access to medical expertise from various countries was a necessity.
A number of high-level guests were given demos of the MnTS capabilities which they found impressive and very useful for consequence management. The guests included the President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, NATO's Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, the Prime Minister of Ukraine, Arseniy Yatsenyuk and the Deputy Assistant Secretary General for NATO Operations Division, Ambassador Francesca Tardioli.