Sample influenza business continuity plan

My colleague and fellow IAEM Asia member Chew Lip Heng and I started writing a sample corporate incident action plan (IAP) for influenza in 2005 during the H5N1 panic. This is an Adobe Acrobat PDF version and this is the version in Microsoft Word format that you can customize.

It's eight pages long. It isn't complete or perfect, and I've decided it probably never will be. After four years of gestation, I'm tired of the labor pains. We hope you can use it as a basis for your own planning.

The term "Incident Action Plan" (IAP) is derived from the U.S. Incident Command System (ICS). We've used that term because our plan contains elements you'd find in business continuity, crisis management and emergency management plans. We have not included all the elements that a U.S. emergency manager would expect to find in a real IAP. We hope they will forgive us.

In theory, our plan format could be used for any infectious disease, and by any public or private entity. By replacing the country-specific links in it (to the Singapore Ministry of Health), it could be also used anywhere in the world.

Alert Levels
Our plan has only three stages or alert levels: Prepare, Prevent, Respond. The six stages used by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the five stages used by the Singapore Ministry of Health (MOH), where we live, are too many for us to remember. We don't think most people or companies can remember more than three, either. The fewer, the better, we think.

As you'd expect, there are a lot more decisions to make in the Prepare stage than in any other, so that section is longer. Tasks in the Prevent and Respond stages refer in many instances to tasks in the Prepare stage. If you don't prepare, you can't be effective at prevention or response anyway.

We've used loud colors for each stage, but that's just cosmetic. Our colors don't correspond to anyone else's alert level color scheme. As you may have discovered since the outbreak of the H1N1 pandemic, it can be difficult to cross-reference national and international alert levels. That's likely to be a problem in the future, too.

References & Clinical Disease Information
The Singapore MOH, the WHO and U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) links we've inserted all work (at least, they did at the time this article was posted), but they're intended only to be samples of sources of information you could include in your own plan. Singapore is probably the country best-prepared for influenza, as it is one of a few First World countries that has direct experience with SARS, "bird flu" and H1N1 in the last six years. So the Singapore MOH guidance on workplace infection control measures is worth your attention.

Note This is the Singapore MoH guidance on infection control measures for influenza, as of 22 July 2009.

Our plan assumes that a company has completed a business impact analysis (BIA), one of the foundations of all business continuity planning. From the results of a BIA, a company can prioritize business processes during an epidemic, based on the impact that failure of those processes would have on a company. A BIA also brings the company to consensus about the minimum number of people to perform each of those processes over time--in the case of pathogenic infectious disease, as long as six weeks at a stretch.

We suppose you could try to prepare a response plan for influenza without a BIA, but as they say in the United States these days, "good luck with that".

Strategies
We have assigned each task in our plan to the department or team that we think would be responsible for it; you can, of course, change the department. Our departments are Human Resources, Facilities, Corporate Communications, Insurance, Finance, Security, Travel, Information Technology. Our plan assumes an organization has three teams: an Incident Response Team IRT), a Crisis Management Team (CMT) and a BCP team.

Determining strategies isn't astrophysics: to execute your plan, you'll need people, so the primary objective of any plan should be to try to prevent all your employees from getting sick at the same time. That means segregating some of them--the minimum number to perform the processes--from each other either in space (separate offices, if you have them) or time (shifts, if you don't).

We assume that your company will either have to work (extremely) short-handed or will be forced to close temporarily. That was our experience in Singapore's financial sector influenza exercise in 2008: as simulated absenteeism rose, efficiency declined in direct proposition. At absentee rates of 50 percent and higher, some financial institutions were forced to close the doors.

Our plan is probably missing some of the pointers we picked up by living through SARS in 2003 and H5N1 influenza in 2005. In Singapore, the prevention and preparations steps have been the about the same for all three, and by the time H1N1 reached us in June 2009, we reckon Singapore was able to react appropriately and quickly. Maybe that comes from having experienced the diseases in descending order of severity. H1N1 in Singapore caused nothing like the outright fear engendered by SARS in 2003.

Hit us with your best shot
I welcome comments and suggestions to our e-mail addresses, or comments posted here. I do not respond to anonymous comments, but I will make a valiant attempt to respond to e-mail messages. If you modify the plan document and want to send back your modifications, we'll be grateful. I'll try to re-post a shared version eventually.

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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.