Imperial College London and Community Jameel bring multilingual online ventilator tool to parts of the world most vulnerable to COVID-19

• The tool gives healthcare workers the knowledge they need to ventilate patients through a short how-to video
• Responding to need in parts of the Arab world, Africa, India and Latin America to strengthen healthcare systems in response to COVID-19, the tool has been translated into five languages

An online ventilator training tool will be available to healthcare workers in those communities around the world most vulnerable to COVID-19 after being newly translated from English into Arabic, French, Hindi, Portuguese and Spanish. The video tutorials, which rapidly equip viewers with the skills to operate a ventilator under supervision, were translated to make them available to clinical teams in countries where COVID-19 epidemics persist, including in parts of Latin America, the Arab world, Africa and India. The translation project was a collaboration between Imperial College London’s NIHR Imperial Patient Safety Translational Research Centre, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, FundamentalVR, and the global philanthropy Community Jameel.

The training consists of short how-to videos that teach the essentials of operating ventilators in just 30 minutes. The tool can be accessed for free by any clinician across the world, regardless of health system or specialism. The new translations give the tool dramatically increased reach, particularly to healthcare workers in regions that are not yet past the peak of the pandemic.

Fady Jameel, President, International – Community Jameel, said: “The COVID-19 pandemic poses a threat to everyone, but the risk is most acute in vulnerable communities not yet past the peak and where healthcare systems do not have the infrastructure to cope with the demands of a pandemic. The global health challenge is huge but we hope making this online ventilator training tool available in more languages can play a small part in helping healthcare workers around the world combat the virus.”

Dr. Hutan Ashrafian, Chief Scientific Adviser at Imperial College London’s Institute of Global Health Innovation and project lead for Imperial, said: “We’re delighted to have developed this tool that allows clinicians all across the globe to access mechanical ventilation training, enabling healthcare staff to learn remotely, at speed, in their own language.

Our tool teaches clinicians from any background to be able to operate these life-saving machines under supervision, helping health systems to increase critical care capacity so that intensive care specialists have more time to care for COVID-19 patients.”

The translation of the tool is latest component of Community Jameel’s extensive COVID-19 response which includes the work of the Jameel Institute, also at Imperial, to model the spread of the virus, the AI Cures initiative at the Jameel Clinic at MIT, which is applying machine learning to discover promising antiretrovirals to treat the disease, and a collaboration with the International Rescue Committee to tackle the ongoing refugee crisis in Jordan which has been exacerbated by the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.