All Hazards Business Continuity Planning
Duration: Few Days / Week to Four Weeks
Impact: Facility / Building to Township / Regional Community
Events over recent years have highlighted the need for the Department of Health and Families to be prepared for a range of potential threats to the provision of our services.
In addition to the Department's obligations under whole-of-government disaster management responses, the Department also has a responsibility to sustain the provision of essential health and community services in the event of major threats. We also have a duty of care to look after our staff as well as the community.
Business Continuity Plans serve a number of important functions:
- identify the specific health and community services that are essential and must be maintained in the event of a major threat;
- identify non-essential services, the delivery of which can be suspended for periods of a week to a month, allowing potentially scarce capacity and infrastructure to be focused on higher priority areas;
- clarify and communicate what the contingency plans are that have been developed to sustain the services identified as essential; and
- provide the organisation's staff with an understanding of how communication will occur, where they will go and how they will be enabled to continue providing the essential services upon which the community relies for its health and well being.
There is considerable similarity in the contingencies developed for many different types of threat. DHF's generic business continuity plan is designed to address the majority of threats in one plan without having to create a multiplicity of different plans. Specific plans, however, may be required for threats not adequately addressed by a generic plan (i.e. Pandemic Influenza).
