In response to the increased likelihood of a pandemic virus, the Government asks for immediate and prudent planning across all sectors and levels.

The Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is your documented strategy for avoiding or minimising adverse impacts on your business operation should a disaster or failure occur, in this context, an influenza pandemic.

Below are factors to consider for your influenza BCP.

Staff Absence

For planning purposes, the base scenario is for:

A cumulative clinical attack rate of 25% of the population over one or more waves, each of around 15 weeks duration, weeks or months apart. The second wave may be the more severe. This compares with a usual seasonal influenza attack rate of 5-10%.

For planning purposes, the reasonable worst case scenario is for:

A cumulative clinical attack rate of 50% of the population, again spread over one or more waves.

There is more staff absence information available on this site.

Issues to consider in Business Continuity Planning

In carrying out business continuity planning, organisations will wish to consider how best to:

• Support the Government's efforts to reduce the impact of the pandemic by:
  1. Taking all reasonable steps to ensure that employees who are ill or think they are ill during a pandemic are positively encouraged not to come into work. Personnel policies may need to be reviewed to achieve this aim.
  2. Ensuring that employers and employees are made aware of Government advice on how to reduce the risk of infection during a pandemic. (Information for staff will be available on the Department of Health website and in printed form.)
  3. Ensuring that adequate hygiene (e.g. hand-washing) facilities are routinely available.

 

• Put in place measures to maintain core business activities for several weeks at high levels of staff absenteeism, including options for remote working and expanding self-service and on-line options for customers and business partners.
• Identify those essential functions and posts, and perhaps individuals, whose absence would place business continuity at particular risk.
• Identify which services could be curtailed or closed down during all, or the most intense period, of the pandemic.
• Ensure that health and safety responsibilities to employees continue to be fully discharged.
• Identify inter-dependencies between organisations and ensure they are resilient, for example by ensuring that supplier organisations delivering services under contract have appropriate arrangements in place themselves to sustain their service provision.
• As necessary, factor into their planning the need to support the health service.
• Factor into their planning the presumption that assistance from the Armed Services will not be available*

* Military assistance might be available in exceptional circumstances, at the time of an emergency, if life and property are in immediate danger. But planning for an influenza pandemic should take into account that military support may not be available if local units are deployed on operations; nor should it be assumed that local units have personnel available with either the skill or equipment to undertake specialist tasks. And military personnel themselves will be vulnerable to the illness.

Factor into your planning that medical counter-measures will not solve business continuity requirements because antiviral drugs for treatment will only lessen the severity of the illness. They will neither cure it nor significantly reduce absenteeism.

In addition, organisations will need (as necessary) to be aware of, and plan for the consequences of measures that the Government may conclude are necessary to control or delay the spread of the disease, which may result in additional staff absence from work.

Further Business Continuity guidance and templates is available on the DCMS website.