Fight Covid 19 - ENGIE Initiatives to address the Coronavirus crisis

Hands up for Gear Up Medical: ENGIE supports the production of intelligent ventilator prototypes

In Belgium, brothers Jan and Stijn Herregodts, students of the UGent, had created a ventilator prototype. They launched a call in the press with their non-profit organization Gear Up Medical to get help from companies to further refine the existing basic prototype of their ventilator. 

"With ENGIE, we jumped straight to the occasion. For such a beautiful project, we were happy to mobilize people and resources to build prototypes, in collaboration with electronics manufacturer Velleman," says Frank Portier of ENGIE Fabricom. 

Thanks to the combined effort and expertise of ENGIE R&D and Tractebel who undertook the coordination of the projects, ENGIE Fabricom and ENGIE Axima finetuned the original design and fabricated mechanical parts for the ventilator in their laboratories at Zwijndrecht. Experts from ENGIE Laborelec tested the mechanical design and sent  three prototypes of the device to the non-profit association on Friday 17 April. These prototypes are ready for further validation tests and medical certification. 

Other actions in Belgium and elsewhere

In the US, ENGIE, through its Conti subsidiary is providing solutions to Ford and General Motors to allow them manufacturing thousands of ventilators. 

ENGIE proposes a rapid transformation of existing infrastructures into hospital extensions. In partnership with Médecins Sans Frontières in Belgium,ENGIE has transformed a youth hostel in Lier into a centre to welcome contaminated patients leaving hospital and requiring medical attention (27 rooms, 78 beds). The conversion took less than 10 days, and first patients arrived beginning of April.

ENGIE is installing oxygen lines in a temporary hospital being deployed at the National Tennis Center in Queens, NY, USA

For the creation of NHS Nightingale hospitals in London, with 3,600 beds, ENGIE team moved to a 24/7 operation and strengthened resilience of critical heating and cooling systems to support the British Army.

ENGIE also managed to carry out in less than 10 days the – reversible – transformation of surgery blocks and possibly recovery rooms into intensive care units, in order to meet the growing demand for the treatment of patients seriously affected by COVID-19. Such transformations have been made for Henri Mondor Hospital in Créteil (France), Coler Hospital and North Central Bronx Hospital in New York, but also in Australia and UK.

Watch more initiatives driven by ENGIE's entities : 

Fight COVID 19 : Reinforce resilience. Accelerate recovery.