Templates published for mass fatality incidents

Many hospitals are unprepared to deal with large numbers of dead bodies--a mass fatality incident, or MFI--that would result from an earthquake or flu pandemic. A "mortality surge" would overwhelm morgue capacity, as it did in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, for example.

U.S. hospitals are required to develop MFI plans by August 2009, and the Los Angeles County Emergency Medical Services Agency has published "Mass Fatality Incident Management: Guidance for Hospitals and Other Healthcare Entities", available on the Los Angeles County Health Services Web site.

The checklists, action plans, flow charts, organizational charts and fact sheets, can also help private-sector contingency planners, unaccustomed to planning for human consequences, foresee "bottlenecks" (page 20) in an MFI in which a company's employees are killed. Guidelines include identifying decedents and their next-of-kin, preserving decedents' property and evidence, and processing death certificates (required to claim insurance benefits).

These are sensitive topics that I've never seen in a HR (human resources) department business continuity plan, but it's obvious how important these matters would be to an employee's next-of-kin.

It will be a big challenge to get HR professionals in Asia to engage in effective planning for them, as it will be very difficult to persuade company executives that these concerns are righfully the responsibility of any company.

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Nathaniel Forbes

Nathaniel Forbes is the director of Forbes Calamity Prevention, a Singapore-based consulting firm providing business continuity, crisis management and emergency response advice and training to multinational companies, with a focus on companies with offices in Asia. The firm is 10 years old. FCP's current and past clients include Singapore Exchange Ltd, OCBC Bank, AXA Insurance, The Gillette Company, Siemens and ABN Amro Bank. A former President of the Singapore Computer Society’s Business Continuity Group, Nathaniel passed the DRII’s Certified Business Continuity Planner (CBCP) examination in 1997. He has lived, traveled or worked in Asia since 1973.