Introducing Our Essential Guide to Creating a Disaster and Emergency Response Plan for Pharmacies
Why business continuity plans or disaster and emergency plans are important?
Business continuity plans and disaster and emergency plans are crucial for any organization including pharmacies to maintain operations during disruptions. For example, the disruption could be from a cyberattack, a pandemic (cringe as we recall COVID!), or other health emergencies from natural hazards – wildfires, floods, earthquakes, etc.
The purpose of these plans are to safeguard your pharmacy, so we have something to fall back on and refer to, to help us respond to the disruption in front of us. Think about those early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when we had no information and were not sure how we should be responding or reacting. By thinking ahead of time and putting our plans and actions down on paper in our plans builds resiliency into our practices as we identify the key resources, processes, and personnel critical for continued functioning.
Ultimately, this minimizes downtime for the pharmacy, which means you can continue to help your community with their health needs but also from the business perspective to continue operations and revenue generation, to keep your pharmacy open and your staff employed.
Disaster plan or business continuity plan or emergency action plan?
There are lots of terms thrown around and it can get a little tricky. Business continuity plans (BCPs) and disaster/emergency action plans are interconnected and complement each other but have slightly different purposes. Often, pharmacies have a BCP which covers the overall business operations, protect assets, and maintain customer services during disruptions. This includes disaster and emergency considerations. However, typically BCPs do not go into much detail for a specific pharmacy disaster response and how to recover, considering the clinical implications, wellbeing of personnel, as well as the business operations and assets.
Having comprehensive disaster/emergency action plans are essential to BCP but can often be overlooked and diluted by the other components of a BCP. So, we have created guides and templates for community pharmacy and hospital pharmacy departments that focus specific on disasters and health emergencies.
Introducing the DPS Disaster and Emergency Management Plan for pharmacy
We have created two comprehensive guides and templates that walk you through the various considerations required to effectively respond and recover from a disaster or health emergency. One is tailored to community pharmacy perspective and the other to hospital pharmacy departments. These are developed from years of experience in researching and working with clients in the pharmacy workforce to be prepared for future disasters and emergencies.
We often think we can survive off our previous experience or that we will wait and figure it out once a disaster or emergency occurs. But this is often short-sighted!
As pharmacists, we are leaders in our community and our governments, community members, pharmacy staff, and patients are all looking to us to provide the direction on how to respond and react to the health emergency.
This was overwhelmingly demonstrated during the COVID-19 pandemic. People sought out pharmacists as a trusted resource for any information related to the pandemic, came to use for advice, testing and vaccinations, and expected us to confidently direct them.
How do you create a disaster or emergency action plan?
Hazard and Vulnerability Assessment
The first step in these plans, is conducting a hazard and vulnerability assessment of your region as we are influenced by where we live. Although we need to be prepared for world-wide impacts like the global pandemic or drug shortages that impact everyone, there are some specific hazards we should be prepared for as we are increased risk of experiencing them compared to other regions. For example, if you live and work in a flood prone zone then you need to be prepared for a flood to happen. It’s not a matter of ‘if’ a flood will impact your region but ‘when’. This can seem like a daunting task to complete these assessments but many cities and regions have this information available and publicly accessible on government website.
All-Hazard Approach
Another important consideration for these plans is to also expect the unexpected. While we have increased risk for specific hazards, that does not mean we can ignore other risks. We at DPS advocate for considering an all-hazard approach. An all-hazard approach allows for the development of a comprehensive disaster and emergency management plan and risk reduction strategies to account for any conceivable hazards, unknowns, and their mutual relationships to each other. You cannot expect hazards to wait in-line for their turn to impact your region. They strike whenever and wherever. Just think of how many regions were trying to copy with the pandemic whilst also being inundated by wildfires across Canada.
Response Considerations
The second key component in creating these plans is to consider the actions you and your staff will take in responding to the disruption or health emergency. For example, if you experience a power outage, what is your plan on maintaining your cold storage? How will you communicate with your patients and community members in the event of a change in operating hours? Are you expecting your staff to come to work if an emergency occurs, but they are not rostered to work? These types of things are important to think through, make plans for, and to develop the relationships needed. This allows you to in a disaster response, hit the ground running, with everyone knowing the plan and what their roles and responsibilities are for the response and recovery periods.
Revising plans
The last key component of disaster plans I want to mention is the importance of revisiting these documents. This should at a minimum be reviewed with your team annually, but also after every health emergency or disruption. It’s important that you update your plan based on the challenges you faced and the lessons you learned, so we can do better next time.
To get help in creating or updating your disaster and business continuity plans, look at our guides and templates available on our website and/or reach out to us and we can help you develop them, test them, and train with them.
We at DPS are in the business of Safeguarding Pharmacies in Times of Crisis: Be Prepared, Stay Resilient. Contact us to find out more!
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