There is no question that organizations should dust off their business continuity plans every few years to make sure things are covered properly. Typically this consists of a little reading, a couple meetings and a lot of pencil whipping.
This swine flu thing may or may not turn into a big deal, but either way - it's a good chance to look a little deeper at contingency plans. Not only because the real-world threat sharpens people's focus, but also because this is nothing like a natural disaster, terrorist attack or many of the other scenarios commonly used to prepare.
Over the last few days I've had to look at the protection of clinical assets in a whole new way. If you take this thing to the worst case scenario, there can be a unprecedented strain on clinical sites. Here's a few quotes from the
1918 Pandemic website :
"Confronted with a shortage of hospital beds, many local officials ordered that community centers and local schools be transformed into emergency hospitals. In some areas, the lack of doctors meant that nursing and medical students were drafted to staff these makeshift hospitals."
"As the disease spread, schools and businesses emptied. Telegraph and telephone services collapsed as operators took to their beds. Garbage went uncollected as garbage men reported sick. The mail piled up as postal carriers failed to come to work.
State and local departments of health also suffered from high absentee rates. No one was left to record the pandemic’s spread and the Public Health Service’s requests for information went unanswered.
As the bodies accumulated, funeral parlors ran out of caskets and bodies went uncollected in morgues."
Granted, our infrastructure can't be compared to the nation's infrastructure in 1918, but my point is - even though we may be much more prepared to handle this kind of thing now, there's got to be new and unforeseen factors we've never had to think about.
Our reaction to the 1976 threat was overkill by most accounts, I'm hoping we can find the happy medium if this thing blows up.
I urge you to take yourself outside the box usually ruled by disaster based contingency planning. Some of the angles I'm trying to look deeply at are:
- Protecting urgent care / general practice clinics from and overflow of patients desperately seeking treatment
- Protecting emergency rooms from the same
- Protecting medical supplies and the logistical supply chain
- Protecting pharmaceutical supplies and that logistical supply chain
- Setting up field treatment sites and protecting them
