On 30 November 2022 PEERS participated in the workshop “Better Practice Guide and Standardisation for all – get involved!” organised by the NO-FEAR project in the Dutch city of Delft.

Hosted by the Royal Netherlands Standardisation Institute (NEN), the workshop was attended by practitioners working across industry, academia, and policy. In disaster medicine, clear and evidence-based standardisation is of pivotal importance to ensuring effectiveness and innovation as new players enter the market. Nevertheless, medical practitioners frequently express their frustrations when it comes to speak about standards. The workshop aimed to break down some of these barriers, encouraging participants to get involved in stardardisation to produce new effective practitioner-driven standards.

Following some introductory background on standardisation and examples about how it fits the real life through selected case studies on e.g., Personal Protective Equipment, Prof. William Hynes (KPMG Future Analytics) presented PEERS as project coordinator.

Prof. Hynes therefore introduced PEERS and how it aims to foster synergies with the NO-FEAR project, thanks to the wide range of activities PEERS will carry out to enhance practitioners’ participation in standardisation. In this regard, PEERS will create a vast database of standards, guides and processes, with significant impact for the production and processes of standards related to the Disaster Risk Management field. All these data will be integrated in the practitioner-driven ecosystem PEERS will release in three versions, to advance and strengthen the EU operational safety and security policies.

The workshop was completed with a round table discussion on “Standardisation – Tonic for Transition”, led by Stephen M. Purcell (KPMG Future Analytics), and featuring different speakers. Amongst them were other PEERS partners, such as Jonathan Hall (Resilience Advisors Network) and Patricia Compard (TFC and chairperson of CEN TC391), as well as other experts supporting PEERS, such as Isabelle Meslier-Renaud (Europol) and David Crouch (3M). During this wide-ranging discussion, different calls to action were highlighted, touching on transparency, practitioner involvement, and the future of the standardisation field.