Business continuity management

Business continuity management (BCM) helps manage risks which may affect the smooth running of our service. It ensures continuity of critical functions in the event of a disruption and an effective recovery afterwards.

All our teams have business continuity plans linked to our critical functions. Our business continuity manager ensures that plans are completed and designed to support the service as a whole, regardless the cause of the interruption.

We follow and comply with the requirements made in the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, which requires category 1 responders to have plans in place to continue critical functions, as far as practicable during an emergency.

Our plans are aligned as far as practical with British Standard 25999. In 2012 the specification ISO 22301:12 was published, and this is to be followed by a code of practice ISO 22313. These two documents take business continuity management to the next level and our Board has agreed we will adopt these international standards for business continuity will be adopted by us. Work to align our Business Continuity Management System to these new standards is ongoing.

We recognise that regardless of taking measures to minimise the likelihood and impact of disruption where we can, there will always be events outside of any control, such as adverse weather, pandemics, and supply failures, as well as loss of buildings, power, communications and information technology. Our teams are assessed to see the risk of such events on their activities and plans are designed to reduce the impact of such disruptions and ensure a prioritised recovery, should such an event incur.

We review and exercise our plans every year and do our best to ensure that we deliver emergency, urgent and out of hospital care to the people of the east of England, whatever the emergency.