Emergency Planning
As a healthcare provider we have to plan for and respond to a wide range of incidents and emergencies that could affect health or patient care. These could be anything from extreme weather conditions to an infectious disease outbreak or a major transport accident or a terrorist act. This is underpinned by legislation contained in the CCA 2004 and the NHS Act 2006 (as amended by the Health and Social Care Act 2022) and the NHS Standard Contract.
Within the NHS this work is known EPRR (Emergency Preparedness Resilience and Response) and ensures that we have suitable plans in place to respond to and manage major incidents, business continuity incidents and critical incidents as defined in the NHS England Emergency Preparedness Resilience and Response Framework 2022.
We work with a number health partners and external agencies as part of a whole system approach to manage emergencies effectively and minimise the disruption to services.
Business Continuity Plans
Each of our service areas has a business continuity plan which describes how they would keep their services running in the event of an emergency. These are reviewed on an annual basis or as a result of being tested or being put into operation.
Emergency Planning Team
Our Emergency Planning Team is responsible for writing, updating and exercising all the Trust emergency plans and assisting teams with developing their own service business continuity plans. In the event of a major incident the team will help to coordinate the Trust response.
The Emergency Planning Team can be contacted by email on hnf-tr.emergencyplanningteam@nhs.net