BUSINESS CONTINUITY
The NHS has to be able to deal with unexpected and catastrophic events, as the Business Continuity Institute’s Tony Hallett explains.
B
usiness Continuity Management (BCM) is an important issue within
the NHS. The swine flu pandemic, the cold- est winter in 30 years, as well as potential transport disruption and power failures to key sites are just a few of the main issues concerning emergency planners and se- nior managers. This list excludes the other major risks from flooding; chemical, bio- logical, radiological and nuclear incidents as well as potential terrorist attacks, all of which could create severe disruption to ser- vice delivery.
The Emergency Planning Division (EPD) at the Department of Health has provided clear and comprehensive guidance to NHS organisations (2007 – NHS Resilience Programme launched) and in November 2009 reached an agreement with the British Standards Institute to provide all NHS or- ganisations with a free copy of BS25999 (Business Continuity Management) stan- dard and access to an online self self-as- sessment tool. This facility provides an excellent vehicle to fully embed BCM into an NHS organisation. If the tool is used to assess the overall organisational BCM status then individual departments or di- rectorates can use the same tool to assess their specific area’s readiness, which can then be compared to the trust’s assessed position and the gaps identified. This can be used to clearly demonstrate areas for BCM development and has been found to be particularly useful in examining internal and external dependencies.
Emergency
However, the one issue that provided the greatest stimulus to BCM development in the NHS was undoubtedly the swine flu pandemic of 2009/10. This created a real real-time environment whereby individual department or directorate managers had
56 | public sector executive Mar/Apr 11
“THERE WILL BE A DEMAND FOR RAPID AND EFFECTIVE COMMAND AND CONTROL WITH LITTLE TIME FOR DETAILED DEBATE.”
to examine their services and categorise these services into those which could be reduced or cancelled or those which had to continue as core services. Managers ex- amined staffing requirements using a four scenario system of escalating clinical de- mand with an increase in staff absence to further review potential service delivery.
To develop this part of the planning pro- cess, the organisation’s emergency plan- ning team met with all the heads of nursing from all clinical areas plus representatives from key support services, such as porter- ing, IT, utilities, and cleaning, and mapped
the interdependencies. This exercise iden- tified key services common to a great deal of clinical service delivery and identified at a trust level where staffing reinforcements were essential to continue to function. This allowed the trust to focus clinical cross-training into areas which provided the greatest return on investment.
Unlike our counterparts in the financial sector, where BCM was first enacted, NHS organisations cannot just have a BCM plan which essentially moves a service to anoth- er location and then continues to function. There is some limited scope for this with some health services but generally health service delivery is predicated on use of specialist facilities, such as intensive care, operating theatres, dialysis suites, and therefore BCM in the NHS takes on a very
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