Increase general practice preparedness for emergency
Emergencies such as bushfire, flood and pandemic, pose a real risk to business continuity in general practice. Our region has battled with all three within the past year. It is crucial that practices have up-to-date and tested emergency response plans ready for a range of disaster circumstances.
An emergency plan ensures your practice is prepared, well stocked and well positioned to respond to the crises at hand and still address the health needs of the community.
It is a requirement of the RACGP Standards for general practices (5th edition) that practices write and maintain emergency response plans (C3.3).
Goal
Improve business continuity and preparedness by writing and regularly reviewing emergency response plans.
Measure of success
Completion of initial emergency response audit and planning
Regular review process established
Actions
- Prepare an emergency response audit tool:
- Have you got a plan in place for your practice?
- Is the plan current?
- When was it last reviewed?
- Who needs to be involved in developing it?
- Does it integrate with other response services?
- Are staff in the practice aware of the plan and do they know their role in the event of a disaster or emergency?
- Watch the RACGP Emergency Response Planning video (5:10)
- Create your Emergency Response Plan for your practice
Tools and resouces
The resources below are designed to assist you through the process.
- Read the HealthPathways Disaster Management – General Practice Response page.
- Visit the Healthy North Coast Disaster Management – Information for North Coast Health Professionals page.
- Read examples of general practice emergency planning tools, including the AGPAL Crisis Plan.
- Utilise the Business Continuity Template to assist with planning. This template has been sourced from the RACGP Pandemic Influenza Toolkit.
- Consider utilising the RACGP Emergency Response Planning Tool (ERPT). It contains 17 different modules and emergency circumstance planning. Please note the tool is subscription based with an annual fee of $385 (including GST).