Mission Possible: Planning and Preparing for a Health Crisis

Emergent health threats are currently grabbing headlines across the globe, but these threats to businesses have existed for many years, and well-prepared multinational companies prudently include them in their contingency plans. Many European companies are now reviewing their crisis plans and attempting to calculate the potential loss of productivity and revenue if the current pandemics continue to grow and if regional workforces are materially affected. Others, however, appear to be taking a more laissez faire approach, and a surprising number of companies have not established a crisis plan. Western European governments have maintained the firm ideology that corporations in the region need to adopt a measured stance with regard to their business planning to ensure a balance for action.

So, what should companies consider when planning for major health contingencies?

UK-based risk planning company, Business Forums International, is hosting a number of contingency planning conferences in the coming months to meet the demand from European companies who want to learn how to devise and implement a business contingency plan in the event of a major health crisis. Elizabeth Smith, Managing Director of Business Forums International, said that the avian flu outbreak of recent years caused businesses to take a more serious approach to the current threat and overall, contingency planning was higher on the corporate agenda than ever before. “We have worked with more than 10,000 businesses across Europe in the last three years to determine the level of threat to their specific sectors, and to provide strategic and tactical information that will help ensure their organisations can prepare for and commercially operate through a major health crisis,” Smith said. According to Smith, the key areas which companies require assistance with are drafting a contingency policy, identifying reliable sources of information that will affect the development of that policy, and testing and implementing the policy.

The first step in developing a health contingency policy is to recognise what potential effects a widespread disease outbreak may have on the business. Smith characterises these effects under the following key headings:

Healthcare Provision Failures: A widespread pandemic could result in hospitals and medical professionals being overstretched and normal services diverted from other healthcare imperatives to servicing outbreak victims.

Travel Restrictions: Countries seriously affected by an outbreak may see their normal logistical and supply chain operations fail as cross-border transport becomes undesirable or unfeasible.

Workforce Depletion: An outbreak can adversely affect the productivity of individual companies. Widespread absenteeism is more likely to occur due to sickness, which could prevent the regular infrastructural operations of an area or country.

Overall Economic Downturn: Certain sectors such as transportation, travel and tourism are likely to be affected immediately, but overall slow-down would be inevitable if workforces are substantially depleted, even temporarily.

Experience and, in particular, recent patterns have shown that a well-articulated health contingency plan can assist companies in avoiding the worst effects of a widespread threat. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has recommended the adoption of a multi-sectoral, collaborative approach to mitigate the impact of an influenza pandemic on society. WHO has also proposed that the following key points be included in every organisation’s emergency planning checklist:

• Identify a pandemic coordinator/team with defined responsibilities for response planning.
• Identify essential employees, suppliers, materials and logistics required to maintain business operations.
• Train and prepare ancillary/back-up workforce (in other locations, external contractors, etc.).
• Determine the potential impact of a health crisis on company financials, given a variety of scenarios.
• Forecast for employee absences due to personal illness, family member illness, school closures and public transportation closures.
• Modify the type and frequency of face-to-face contact.
• Determine the impact on business-related travel and establish policies for restricting travel to affected geographical areas.
• Establish policies for flexible and home working, and enhance communications and information technology to facilitate the policies.
• Establish an emergency communications plan to include all employees, and update and revise it regularly.
• Implement exercises to test the plan and revise periodically.

Finally, all expert authorities seem to agree that a critical element to any planning exercise is ensuring that the company’s workforce is fully aware of the health threat in question and the measures the company is taking to prepare for it in order to protect its people and its business.