At the end of Feb­ru­ary, the Covid-19 epi­dem­ic spread rapid­ly in Mul­house and the French Grand Est. The Mul­house hos­pi­tal saw a flood of patients sat­u­rat­ing its inten­sive care unit. The deci­sion was there­fore tak­en to install a Mil­i­tary Inten­sive Care Unit of the Armed Forces Health Ser­vice (EMR-SSA). Patrick Hokayem, who grad­u­at­ed from the UTC in bio­log­i­cal engi­neer­ing in 2004 and is now a project man­ag­er at the cen­tral man­age­ment of the Armed Forces Health Ser­vice, led this deploy­ment, quite extra­or­di­nary in terms of design and tech­ni­cal execution. 

Patrick Hokayem has always been pas­sion­ate about health tech­nolo­gies. “Dur­ing my third year at uni­ver­si­ty, I dis­cov­ered the UTC, found­ed by Guy Deniélou. “I was total­ly con­vinced by its “à la carte” teach­ing sys­tem, this encour­aged me to apply and I was admit­ted to the bio­engi­neer­ing specilai­sa­tion. I was par­tic­u­lar­ly attract­ed to bio­med­ical tech­nolo­gies because they are con­stant­ly evolv­ing. Fur­ther­more, bio­med­ical tech­nol­o­gy paves the way for indus­try, engi­neer­ing offices, hos­pi­tal archi­tec­ture and design, appli­ca­tion engi­neer­ing and train­ing, etc. ”

As a young grad­u­ate, he first worked for a small start-up com­pa­ny as an appli­ca­tion engi­neer in the field of neu­ro­log­i­cal diag­no­sis. “I then worked as a process qualification/validation engi­neer at the French Blood Estab­lish­ment where I helped mod­ernise the tech­ni­cal plat­form for the prepa­ra­tion of labile blood prod­ucts,” adds Patrick Hokayem, who then joined the French Army Health Ser­vice (SSA) as a con­tract offi­cer. He began his career at the cen­tral equip­ment estab­lish­ment of this same ser­vice, as a meth­ods engi­neer in charge of the design of field hos­pi­tals and their inte­grat­ed med­ical envi­ron­ment. “Then I worked for eight years as a hos­pi­tal bio­med­ical engi­neer in charge of main­te­nance and med­ical investments”. 

In 2015, he joined the oper­a­tions divi­sion of the SSA’s cen­tral man­age­ment as project man­ag­er for a health arma­ment pro­gramme, in con­junc­tion with the French Defence Pro­cure­ment Agency (DGA). “The ini­tial infor­ma­tion sys­tem I head now con­cerns telemed­i­cine”. explains Patrick. “That’s how I learned to deploy in the Barkhane the­atre in the Sahel, but also with­in the units of the French Navy, a remote med­ical exper­tise solu­tion that enables advice on the care of sick or wound­ed sol­diers. This sup­port reduces the iso­la­tion of our pro­ject­ed health per­son­nel, who ben­e­fit direct­ly from the sup­port of mil­i­tary hos­pi­tals in main­land France. »

In March, Patrick Hokayem was giv­en the task of deploy­ing the thir­ty-bed EMR-SSA as quick­ly as pos­si­ble in Mul­house. A major chal­lenge, because it is very unusu­al: “The SSA usu­al­ly deploys small or medi­um-sized struc­tures on oper­a­tions, where the wound­ed sol­dier has the short­est pos­si­ble stay before being repa­tri­at­ed to main­land France. Here, we had to cre­ate and deploy ex nihi­lo a real 30-bed inten­sive care unit.” His team, the mil­i­tary med­ical sup­plies and the med­ical reg­i­ment are coor­di­nat­ing with the tech­ni­cal man­age­ment of the Mul­house hos­pi­tal to solve the many prob­lems that arise: the struc­ture’s archi­tec­ture, pur­chas­es and med­ical sup­plies, care teams that are not up to speed with the imple­men­ta­tion of com­plete rean­i­ma­tion envi­ron­ments under canvas…,”However, Patrick is pleased to say, “this has­n’t pre­vent­ed us from doing things in com­plete safe­ty! “And it was achieved, in just six days, between the order giv­en by the Pres­i­dent of the Repub­lic and the actu­al recep­tion of the first patient. 

As the pres­sure on the Mul­house hos­pi­tal’s inten­sive care unit eased, the EMR-SSA has not seen any more patients since May 7. How­ev­er, the dis­man­tling of the struc­ture also brought its share of prob­lems, as Patrick con­firmed: “Among the prob­lems to be dealt with, there was of course the com­plete decon­t­a­m­i­na­tion of every­thing before repa­tri­a­tion of the struc­ture… In addi­tion, the SSA must be ready for any oth­er request.” 

This epi­dem­ic and the chal­lenges it has brought with it have taught Patrick a lot: “Above all, a lot of humil­i­ty in the face of the suf­fer­ing of patients and their loved ones.… Then, as a sol­dier used to engage­ments dur­ing exter­nal oper­a­tions, it is a joy and a pride to direct­ly sup­port our own peo­ple: the French pop­u­la­tion! And final­ly, in spite of the dif­fi­cul­ties, it is above all a mag­nif­i­cent human expe­ri­ence shared by the var­i­ous par­ties involved, both civil­ian and mil­i­tary! What a beau­ti­ful shar­ing of cul­ture and what a beau­ti­ful symbioses!”