HEALTHY SAILING (HS) is a 36-month (September 2022 – August 2025) Horizon Research and Innovation Action whose consortium represents 24 members from 12 countries. The project’s general objective is to improve the quality of passenger shipping services brought to society, facilitating recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and making the passenger shipping sector safer, more resilient, competitive and efficient. HEALTHY SAILING provides a comprehensive approach introducing innovative, multi-layered, risk and evidence-based, cost-effective tested prevention, mitigation and management measures for infectious disease and training, differentiated for large ferries, cruise ships and expedition vessels, intended for use in policymaking and ship operations, and whose implementation will reduce public health incidents on-board large passenger ships.
The project will establish a comprehensive scientific evidence-base concerning mechanisms that facilitate the on-board spread of infection and effectiveness of different mitigation measures and will develop evidence-informed guidelines: (i) Prevention, mitigation and management of COVID-19 in routine ship operations, (ii) Vaccination of passengers and crew in large passenger ships (iii) Specificities and needs of medical operations in expedition vessels, (iv) Updating existing guidelines for passenger ship ventilation systems, considering droplet and aerosol transmission risks.
The tested and validated measures for healthy environments and early health threat detection on-board to be developed include: (i) a toolkit for systematic monitoring of surface cleaning and disinfection and artificial Intelligence (AI) Water Safety Plan decision support tool to simplify plan development, improve water quality and prevent waterborne diseases, (ii) a syndromic surveillance system of infection diseases for passenger ships, (iii) an integrated health e-surveillance IT system (E-SS) for infectious diseases, covering all data management needs for efficiently performing real-time syndromic, laboratory and environmental health surveillance, (iv) an artificial Intelligence (AI) Intelligence Immune System (IIS), receiving input data to produce a voyage profile and health threat alerts, characterise threat levels and recommend/monitor health measures and (v) an inventory of fast diagnostic laboratory methods including safe and reliable self-specimen collection protocols for crew and passengers. Finally, the proposed measures will address the facilitated access to ship medical facilities encouraging reporting among travelers.
In parallel the project will address port operations and community needs through (i) testing and demonstrating an integrated e-pass based on one-ID concept for optimized embarkation, effective and continuous tracking of travellers, and extended use of a wearable RFID, (ii) the development of a toolkit predicting port response capacities required for numbers of travellers and interoperability of port/ship contingency plans and (iii) the establishment of a scientific international panel for exchange of best practices and to promote a harmonised global approach. Via the project actions knowledge, awareness and compliance will increase via the development of a blended learning toolkit enriched with hands-on training and a toolkit for technology induced behavioural change in hand hygiene.
This article was drafted, finalised and produced within the framework of the Healthy Sailing project.
