Corporate Pandemic Planning

• Why have a Pandemic Plan?
• Business Continuity Planning
• Defining Essential Business Elements
• Duty of Care for Staff
• Staff who Travel
• Staff who Work at Home
• Psychological Issues
• Useful Checklists

Defining essential business elements

Identification of essential business components is required. This will include core business units, subsets of management, communications, financial controls, particular human resources, and perhaps others. A strategy for protecting these essential components will be required.

Operations

Specific operational components essential for business continuity need to be protected. Many companies will already have identified essential business elements, and these need to be considered in the light of possible pandemic scenarios of low staffing, lack of transport, social isolation, and supply-chain disruption.

Planners will need to consider what tasks can be done at home, what tasks need to be staffed by indispensable staff, and what services can be modified to reduce human resources and public interaction.

Overseas operations should be considered in the light of partial or total shutdown, possible border closures and quarantine delays. Operations dependent on other international organisations should identify what strategic planning is being done by those organisations and what their proposed emergency responses might be.

Human resources

The expected feature of an influenza pandemic is of major community-wide illness, which will result is staffing shortages due to personal illness and the need for people to take time off to care for the ill.

A possible worst-case estimate suggests up to 40% of the working population could be affected in the peak of a pandemic. This could last several weeks. Absence rates of 5-10% could be expected over a much longer period after the initial phase.

Particular issues for staff with occupational exposures to pandemic influenza and those essential workers who may be provided with antivirals include:

• monitoring of staff for illness and adverse reactions to antiviral medications
• implementing six week rotations of staff on antivirals
• supervised and recorded dosing of antivirals.

There will be a very important pool of workers who contract the disease but survive and hence become immune. If a database of these individuals was kept it would make staffing front-line public areas easier. Also, this group would not require vaccination when it did eventually became available, thereby easing the pressure on vaccinating the remaining non-immune population.

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