The COVID19 outbreak is placing overwhelming pressure on healthcare infrastructures across the globe. Since early 2020, swiftly and on a massive scale, convention and exhibition centres have become part of the front line in fighting the disease, from serving as ICU hospitals to conducting thousands of tests a day. Many AIPC (International Association of Convention Centres) and UFI (Global Association of the Exhibition Industry) members are leading this unprecedented effort to save lives. 

Convention and exhibition centres have been used in an emergency capacity across the world many times in recent decades, sometimes for weeks and sometimes for months on end. TEFs are most often set up in the wake of major natural disasters that damage or destroy large amounts of infrastructure, like the 2004 Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Time and again they have proven crucial to community survival: as a care centre, a shelter, a hub of aid distribution, and for other emergency purposes. 

Health, safety, security and operations experts and managers of AIPC and UFI worked together over early April 2020 via the AIPC-UFI Safety & Security Task Force to create this good practice guidance. While the information is applicable to all kinds of TEF uses, its main emphasis is on the use of TEFs as emergency hospitals. 

The guideline covers the three main phases of repurposing or conversion of a facility: setting things up, running an operation, and afterwards, closing things back down in preparation for a return to normal. 

As the circumstances for taking a convention or exhibition centre into use as a TEF will vary widely, indeed sometimes dramatically so, and centres themselves vary considerably in size, make-up, location and services, the advisability, applicability and proportionality of steps/plans/procedures/ measures should be taken into account when considering their use. So should the legal and compliance rules and frameworks that might apply. In some cases, the government may simply confiscate a facility for TEF use; in others, management might draw up a proper contract. 

To download the full guide, please follow the link.

For further updates and related topics, keep looking on AIPC an UFI websites, or other sections of ECCP COVID19 response forum.