Emergency Management Planning
Emergency Management Planning: Who will be in charge? Could we have foreseen this? How do we recover?
These are just some of the many questions that should be addressed in planning for an emergency long before you need to have the answers in real time!
Emergency management planning is vital for almost all businesses. Naturally, the scale of planning required will vary depending on the complexity of an individual business. For example, the detail required in an emergency management plan for a major hazard facility will be far greater than that required for an online sole trader. Nevertheless, every business should consider having an emergency management plan.
Emergency management planning is much more than evacuation planning and fire warden training. Thorough emergency management planning will be empowered by your organisation’s Board or owners, executed by senior management and implemented by all members of your organisation.
A well-considered emergency management plan is vital for any organisation to advance following an emergency and should complement the organisation’s business continuity plan.
How do you know if your emergency management planning arrangements are sufficient to meet the needs of an emergency?
Nuffield Group has developed an “Emergency Management Plan self-assessment guide” which identifies the imperative elements that your emergency management plan should have and allows you to assess your organisation’s current plan.
In broad terms the critical elements of any emergency management plan include:
- Hazard identification and understanding the trends and underlying root causes of incidents
- Checking incident management systems and processes are effective and align with the risk appetite of your organisation.
- Establishing, current and relevant formal procedures for your organisation.
- Testing and exercising your emergency management plan.
- Formally training team members in their roles in emergency management.
- Having effective internal and external communication.
- Having appropriate tools and infrastructure in place.
- Establishing structure and process around lessons to be learnt to ensure continuous improvement.
- Developing business continuity and recovery plans to minimise disruption to operations, customers, and other vital business functions; and assist in recovery.
- Having the current capability and capacity to respond to, and recover from, an emergency.
Nuffield Group’s “Emergency Management Plan self–assessment guide” enables an organisation to undertake an assessment of their own emergency management plan on a regular basis to ensure it is strong, thorough and empowered to meet the emergency management needs of the organisation, stakeholders and the community.
The guide identifies the imperative elements that your emergency management plan should have and allows you to assess your organisation’s current plan.
It is a simple and easy-to-use template that results in an action plan when improvement is needed.
Nuffield Group’s ‘Emergency Management Plan self-assessment guide’ is published on our collaborative online platform, GNTX. Here, non-competitive information and tools are made available for businesses to share, download and modify for their own use.
Find out more about GNTX here: https://www.nuffieldgroup.com/gntx/ or contact us to discuss.
