Managing emergencies and disasters in general practice

Emergency management approach: Prevention and Preparedness, Response and Recovery

Table of contents

Emergency management approach: Prevention and Preparedness, Response and Recovery

Before developing or finetuning your emergency response plan, begin by becoming familiar with the fundamental framework of emergency management planning.

Understanding how to approach and manage an emergency on a broad level, and how your emergency response plan will apply in a genuine event, will help you to develop and flesh out a user-friendly and functional plan that is tailored to your practice and community.

Emergency management planning involves the following key areas of focus:

Prevention and preparedness,
Response, and
Recovery.

Together, these key areas help to reduce risk and increase resilience, while supporting effective response and recovery capabilities.

The key areas are flexible and regularly overlap. For example, recovery activities will likely begin during the response period, and mitigation strategies should be considered in the recovery period.

Prevention

Prevention involves taking measures to help prevent or reduce the cause, impact and consequences of an emergency or disaster.

Implementing proactive, targeted prevention and mitigation strategies designed to address likely risk factors and reduce the possible impact of disasters will help to ensure that your practice is safer, more resilient and sustainable and can provide continuity of care.

Implementing prevention measures can look like:

dedicating time and resources to create a strong culture of cyber safety amongst your practice team members to reduce to likelihood and, in some cases, impact of a cyberattack (practice team members may be more likely to recognise and report a cyberattack faster),
if your practice is located in an area prone to bushfires, hiring a gardener or groundskeeper to regularly maintain your practice’s gardens or outdoor areas appropriately,
if your practice has been affected by floods in previous years, or is in an area often affected by flooding, rebuilding on higher grounds or seeking expert advice regarding how to best flood-proof your space, or
ensuring your patients and practice team members are up to date with their immunisations.

Preparedness

Preparedness involves conducting risk assessments to identify and prioritise key activities and measures that will help you to reduce the impacts of a potential emergency or disaster on your practice, team and patients.

Planning and preparedness are continuous; your practice team should be planning and preparing for a disruptive event throughout the year.

When planning for an emergency or disaster, consider:

any potential risks, dangers or threats,
your practice’s vulnerabilities,
practice team awareness, education and engagement strategies,
how your team will know when to activate your emergency response plan,
how to collaborate with other relevant services,
methods of communication (internal and external), and
your practice’s emergency and disaster capability development (how your practice obtains, strengthens and maintains preparedness, response and recovery strategies).

Taking an all-hazards approach will help to ensure you are appropriately prepared for a broad range of potential events, leaving as little room for surprise as possible.

Ensuring practice team member emergency and disaster education is prioritised prior to an event will result in improved response and recovery phases. With proper and ongoing education, mistakes are more likely to be learnt from instead of repeated, ultimately improving your response plan and increasing your practice’s resilience.

Work Health and Safety obligations

All practices have a responsibility under Work Health and Safety (WHS) laws to provide a safe working environment for team members, contractors and visitors.

Your practice must ensure, so far as is reasonable and practicable, that people are not put at risk by work carried out as part of your business operations. Your practice is therefore obliged to identify and eliminate or mitigate risks. If it is not reasonably practicable to eliminate certain risks to health and safety, you must reduce those risks, so far as is reasonably practicable.

In addition to your practice’s obligations, . They are required to take reasonable care for their own health and safety, as well as the health and safety of others that may be affected by their choices/actions. All team members must comply with any reasonable WHS policies to keep your practice safe.

It’s important that you work with your full team to build a strong safety culture and ensure that all team members are aware of their responsibilities when it comes to WHS.

Visit the website or your for specific information and guidance in this field.

Part of providing a safe workplace includes supporting and making efforts to maintain the mental health of your team. Visit ‘Caring for yourself and your team’ to find out how you can best support your fellow team members.

Response

Response involves taking action in response to your practice’s pre-determined emergency plan activation triggers, or once an emergency or disaster has been declared. Most actions and measures you take should be planned in anticipation of, during, and immediately after an event to help ensure the event’s effects are minimised.

However, emergencies and disasters are not always predictable and unplanned action will often need to be taken. This needs to be clearly acknowledged and understood by the full team to help ensure a confident response in the face of uncertainty.

Planning well for response means protecting lives, property and making your practice a safe space where possible. An effective response plan will contribute to improved recovery results.

Recovery

Planning for recovery involves becoming aware of actions you and your team can take to successfully get back to ‘business as usual’. The aim is to avoid being caught off-guard with the aftermath of an event, which can often be overwhelming and disheartening and may last days, months, or years.

To help get your practice back on track as quickly as possible, you will need to understand the possible (sometimes extreme) impacts emergencies and disasters may have on your practice and local communities, plan certain steps you can take to manage or mitigate probable issues (i.e., damage to infrastructure and an inundation of patients seeking updates and support) and decide who will play what role in your recovery process.

Keep in mind that the recovery process may take longer than you expect. Learnings from this process (as well as those from throughout the entire event) are valuable. Record all important learnings and use them to further improve your emergency response plan for future use.

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