Please note: if you are using an Emergency Operations Plan Template, or any of the templates provided below, you will need to REVISE, UPDATE, and MAKE THE PLAN FIT YOUR FACILITY. Templates can be beneficial in guiding your process, but they do not replace the real work that goes into developing an EOP. To have a plan that will actually work for your facility in a disaster, you need to either compile it without using a template, or use the template as a starting point only. Remember, it is critical to involve your staff as well as outside partners in your planning process, and to practice your plan!
Components of a Good Emergency Operations Plan
The four steps below will assist you in understanding your particular risks and vulnerabilities to certain disasters (and what can be done about them), considering the role your facility will play as a critical component of the community, working with partners, and finally, writing your Emergency Operations Plan. It's important to go through all of these steps to build a functional plan that will serve you well in a disaster.
- First Step–Mitigation
A good facility Emergency Operations Plan, or EOP, starts with a Hazard and Vulnerability Assessment. After the HVA is complete, you will know which hazards (both internal and external) pose the greatest risk to your facility, and you can work to mitigate, or reduce, the effects of your most probable disasters. Examples of mitigation include bolting tall bookshelves to the walls in earthquake-prone areas, or clearing flammable brush away from your home or facility in fire-prone areas. Before taking action, prioritize the potential emergencies that you have identified in your HVA.
See the sample Management of Environmental Hazards Form for ideas on assessing safety issues within your facility, as well as the Structural and Non-Structural Mitigation Form. This is also a good time to re-visit your insurance coverage to make certain that it provides coverage for the risks you identified as highest in your HVA.
- Next Step–Considering your Role
Your EOP should consider your facility's role in a disaster, and what you will need to carry that out. Your first responsibility will be to protect your staff, residents and visitors, as well as critical equipment and records and the facility itself. Have you considered additional roles, such as taking on a different facility's residents if they need to evacuate, or providing stepped down care to patients that had to be discharged from the hospital to make room for an influx of higher acuity patients in a wide-spread disaster? Remember that your facility is part of a broader community–it is important to take this into consideration in your planning efforts.
- Third Step–Preparing
It's critical to work with outside partners within your community to be successful in your planning process. Talk with first responders, transport companies, security companies, food distributors, acute care facilities, utility companies, etc. to clarify roles and expectations. Call your local fire department or local Office of Emergency Services to find out who is in charge of emergency services coordination in your county.
Understand the systems, SEMS and NIMS , that California uses to respond to disasters, and where you fit into that. This will help you locate resources when you need them. Your EOP also needs to consider command and control of the disaster within your facility. Using a tool like HICS, or Hospital Incident Command System, can help you do this in a way that links with the outside community's command structure. You'll need to modify the organizational chart and Job Action Sheets to make them relevant to your facility. You should also be clear on who has the authority to activate the EOP, and what kinds of internal and external triggers may need to exist before the plan is put into action.
- Fourth Step–Writing your Plan
Now that you have reviewed your likely hazards, done what you can to minimize them, talked with your outside partners, learned about how your facility fits in to your community's response system and made decisions about who (internally) has certain authorities in a disaster, you are ready to write your plan.
Your plan should include the assessments and forms you worked on in preparation for writing (as developed in Steps 1-3). Your EOP needs to be developed with the involvement and investment of your organization's leaders and medical staff. It should include your organization's roles and responsibilities in a disaster, and decision points, or triggers, for critical decisions (such as deciding that evacuation is necessary). It helps to include a communications/notification section that has a process and a phone tree for contacting your employees, as well as contact information (24 hours a day) for your key partners, authorities and critical infrastructure.
You may also wish to include any Memoranda of Understanding -consider developing MOUs between yourself and a like facility in case you need to evacuate, MOUs with key vendors to maintain your supplies, MOUs with transportation companies, and MOUs with local hospitals. Remember, it is more than just MOUs that will help you through a disaster–it is the professional relationships you build with these other organizations.
Other aspects to consider including in your plan are continuity of operations (including financial operations), risk communication (internally and externally), disaster mental health, the use of volunteers (both existing and spontaneous) and surge capacity preparedness.
It is also important to have sections of the plan that address response and recovery. In the response section, you may wish to include the HICS organizational chart (modified to fit the needs of your organization) and Job Action Sheets (similarly modified). Make sure your EOP has a process for identifying and assigning staff to cover all of your essential staff functions in a disaster situation. You may not have all of your staff available to you after a disaster, but you can increase your chances of retaining staff if they have personal emergency plans at home, understand their disaster roles and responsibilities at work, have ready access to transportation and understand that the organization will still pay them for coming to work. Staff will also be more likely to return to work or stay at work if the facility EOP includes provisions for their dependents (including pets–even if it is to simply determine the nearest pet disaster shelter) and family, and if they understand that the EOP takes into account caregiver disaster mental health needs (such as incident debriefing).
The facility EOP should also address the important issue of evacuation–what roles will staff play, who needs to be notified, how it will be conducted, where you will evacuate to, how to prepare residents for evacuation when it becomes necessary. Remember to include processes for evacuating horizontally as well as vertically, when applicable. For more information on evacuation planning, click here.
In the recovery section, consider what it will take to get back to business as usual (consider events that have damaged your facility, caused evacuation, caused a surge of residents within your facility, etc.). Your plan should describe how/when and by whom each of the phases (response and recovery) will be initiated.
Use an "all hazards" approach to writing the plan, and then add annexes to the plan to deal with the specifics of particular disasters (i.e. flooding, earthquakes, pandemic influenza). Your core plan remains essentially the same no matter what type of disaster you are dealing with.
Additional Considerations (modified from JCAHO's Management of the Environment of Care)
- Ensure that your EOP can manage activities related to care, treatment and services (modifying or discontinuing certain services; controlling information about residents, referrals, transfer & transport of residents)
- The EOP should provide processes for identifying care providers and other personnel during emergencies–in other words, how your facility will use volunteers. Be sure to understand what the regulations that govern your particular facility say about using volunteers and what types of services they can provide. Keep in touch with your regulatory body during any extensive/prolonged disaster to understand if any regulations have been waived.
- As much as possible, your EOP should consider your existing communications system and any back up systems you may already have, as well as whether additional communications systems may be necessary in a disaster. Consult with your communications vendors to understand the reliability/vulnerability of your communications system(s).
For help getting started with your plan, please review the available web resources.
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Regulation
