Emergency planning and business continuity 

What is emergency planning?

Emergency planning is all about having tried and tested plans in place to deal with any kind of emergency or major incident. A major incident can be defined as an occurrence that presents serious threat to the health of the community, disruption to the service or causes numbers or types of casualties. The plans would help get services running back to normal as soon as possible.

Cheshire & Wirral Partnership Trust (CWP) has a major incident plan to deal with large-scale emergencies and will work with other agencies in the region during the preparedness phase to ensure restore services response and recovery to an incident.

Types of emergencies

  • Flooding incidents

  • Pandemic flu
  • Severe weather including heatwave and cold weather
  • Fuel strikes
  • Chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear incidents
  • Cyber attacks

Emergency plans and policies

  • Business continuity management system

  • Policy and procedures
  • Strategic business continuity plan
  • Evacuation plan
  • Pandemic flu plan
  • Heatwave plan
  • Winter plan
  • Flood plan
  • Fuel plan
  • Resilient telecommunications plan

What is business continuity?

Business continuity is having a system of policies, plans and procedures in place to protect CWP’s essential services when threatened by unforeseen incidents like loss of staff, workspace, ICT, critical data, equipment, and supplies. Staff have planned how to maintain these essential services should these situations arise.

Why have business continuity plans?

Business continuity plans give you a chance to think about your team and how you would carry on running your service in the event something went wrong. All NHS trusts are also legally required to have plans and policies in place under frameworks for civil protection including, but not limited to, the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 and the NHS England Emergency Preparedness, Resilience and Response Framework 2015.

Types of business continuity incidents

  • Loss of staff

  • Loss of workspace
  • Loss of information and communication technology
  • Loss of critical data
  • Loss of equipment
  • Loss of supplies/suppliers/utilities

Please print this page and fill in the details below:

The business continuity lead for my team is:

Their contact number is:

Some areas also have a local lead who attends the local emergency planning meetings.

My local lead is (if you have any questions/concerns please raise them with your local lead who can represent your team at these meetings):

The team business continuity plan is kept:

The date I read the business continuity plan was:

The date I completed my mandatory employee learning in emergency planning & business continuity was (N.B. this needs to be completed every 2 years):

The date of any further emergency planning or business continuity training/awareness raising sessions I attended was: