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    Business Continuity and the Pandemic Threat: Potentially the biggest survival challenge facing organisations
    Business Continuity and the Pandemic Threat: Potentially the biggest survival challenge facing organisations
    Business Continuity and the Pandemic Threat: Potentially the biggest survival challenge facing organisations
    Ebook326 pages4 hours

    Business Continuity and the Pandemic Threat: Potentially the biggest survival challenge facing organisations

    By Robert Clark

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    About this ebook

    The increase in commercial aviation and international travel means that pandemics now spread faster than ever before. Seasonal flu pandemics, zoonotic contagions such as Ebola, swine flu and avian flu, and respiratory syndromes such as SARS and MERS have affected millions worldwide. Add the ever-present threat of terrorism and biological warfare, and the possibility of large proportions of your workforce being incapacitated is a lot stronger than you might think.

    How would your business fare if 50% or more of your employees, including those you rely on to execute your business continuity plan, were afflicted by illness – or worse?

    Although nothing can be done to prevent pandemics, their impact can be significantly mitigated. Business Continuity and the Pandemic Threat explains how.

    Part I: Understanding the Threat provides the reader with a detailed overview of the challenge that pandemic threats can present. It uses historical examples to illustrate how pandemics can have devastating effects not only on the global population but also on critical infrastructure, the global economy, and society.

    Part II: Preparing for the Inevitable considers the actions that can be taken at a global, national, corporate and individual level to mitigate the risk and limit the damage of pandemic incidents. It provides guidance on creating and validating a pandemic plan and explains how it integrates with a business continuity plan. Comprehensive case studies are provided throughout.

    Topics covered include:

    • The World Health Organisation (WHO)’s pandemic phases and the Centre for Disease Control (CDC)’s Pandemic Severity Index
    • Preventive control measures
    • Crisis management and the composition of a crisis management team
    • Dealing with cash-flow, staff absenteeism, home working and supply chain management
    • Communications and media plans
    • Pandemic issues for HR
    • The threat to critical national infrastructure
    • Health service contingency plans and First Responders' business continuity plans
    • The provision of vaccines and antiviral medicines – including relevant ethical issues

     

    LanguageEnglish
    Publisheritgovernance
    Release dateJun 7, 2016
    ISBN9781849288217
    Business Continuity and the Pandemic Threat: Potentially the biggest survival challenge facing organisations
    Author

    Robert Clark

    Robert is a fisheries and conservation manager with 20 years of practical experience of developing and implementing coastal and marine fisheries management. Robert holds degrees in Environmental Protection, Coastal Management and an MBA (Open). The majority of his career has been spent working in fisheries and MPA management and planning in the UK. He worked extensively as a sea going enforcement officer and qualified as a helmsman with the RNLI with extensive prior search and rescue experience. He has been responsible for developing and implementing successful strategy to turn around some of the poorest performing fisheries in the UK and in so doing delivering both conservation as well as economic benefits. Robert is a Council Member of the Institute of Fisheries Management and Chief Officer for the Southern Inshore Fisheries and Conservation Authority where he has overall responsibility for delivering MPA and fisheries management strategy.

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      Business Continuity and the Pandemic Threat - Robert Clark

      definitions

      PART I

      UNDERSTANDING THE THREAT

      CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

      "If an alien visited Earth, they would take some note of humans, but probably spend most of their time trying to understand the dominant form of life on our planet –microorganisms like bacteria and viruses." – Nathan Wolfe, Virologist

      HG Wells is said to have completed writing his classic novel The War of the Worlds in 1897. The storyline is that the Martians had invaded the Earth and humans found themselves completely at their mercy. While the armed forces of the day met the invaders in a head to head struggle, even using the latest state of the art military hardware available at the end of the 19th century, their efforts to defeat the invaders proved to be totally futile. The Martians, however, were finally beaten not by any human endeavours but by an onslaught of earthly microbial infections that were invisible to the naked eye and to which they had no immunity. While Wells was not explicit in terms of naming the microorganisms responsible for causing the demise of the Martian invaders, we can only assume that it was something that man’s own immune system had previously encountered and some degree of immunity had been developed.

      The chilling fact that we must take away from HG Well’s epic story is that when a pandemic strikes, the human race will invariably find itself in a similar situation to the Martian invaders – initially with little or no immunity with which to fight the contagion. So what exactly can we do to prevent a pandemic? The answer quite simply is ‘nothing’. While we can prepare ourselves to face a pandemic, once a life threatening virus mutates to create a human to human communicable form, we are invariably facing the inevitable.

      With that in mind, this book is broken into two parts. First, without getting overly complicated, it looks at the pandemic threat, to enable the reader to gain a good understanding of the multi-faceted challenge that this type of natural phenomenon can present. It uses some of the examples that history provides to illustrate how a pandemic can have devastating effects on not just the global population but also critical infrastructures, the global economy, society and to us as individuals. It takes a look at the impact that the World Health Organisation has had since its creation in 1948, along with the progress that medical profession’s pandemic management approach has made over the last 100 years. It deliberates on just how much warning we can expect when a contagion starts to proliferate across the planet and how that gap has in some cases diminished from several years to a matter of days, or even hours, facilitated by modern aviation travel. With this in mind, the book also relates to a recent event when a lethal virus was rapidly spreading across the planet, even before the World Health Organisation knew of its existence.

      While we cannot prevent a pandemic from happening, we can get ready for its arrival and part two of the book looks at ‘preparing for the inevitable’. It considers the actions that can be taken at a global, country, business and individual level, in the interest of risk mitigation or, if you prefer, a damage limitation exercise. It provides guidance on creating a pandemic plan and how it interfaces with a business continuity plan. Finally, the book offers guidance on how to validate your pandemic plan, as an untested plan is arguably as bad, if not worse, than having no plan at all.

      "The threat of a pandemic, whether it is influenza or a plague in the making, such as the infamous ‘Black Death’ (Yersinia Pestis) of the 1300s has the World Health Organisation (WHO) concerned. The numbers being tossed about are almost beyond comprehension. An influenza pandemic resulting from the H5N1, or avian influenza, could tally from 100 million to 1 billion victims, many of whom will die." – Sikich, 2008

      From the time that Edward Jenner first discovered vaccination in its modern form in 1796, the high probability that humans would each succumb to one disease or another has slowly diminished. With more and more effective treatments and vaccinations becoming available, the killing capabilities of many diseases have been consigned to history. Smallpox, once the scourge of the world, has been eradicated and Poliomyelitis appears to be not far behind. In much of the modern world, heart disease and cancer have replaced virus or bacterial related diseases, taking over the mantle as primary killers.

      "After all it really is all of humanity that is under threat during a pandemic." – Dr Margaret Chan, Director General, World Health Organisation

      However, mutating influenza viruses, with a capacity to generate a pandemic, continue to present mankind with an ongoing challenge. Over the last 300 years, there have been ten incidences of pandemics on record. Moreover, history tells us that, on average, we can expect an influenza pandemic to occur every 20 to 40 years. During the 20th century, there were three such events – the Spanish influenza in 1918–19, Asian influenza in 1957–8 and Hong Kong influenza in 1968–9. The Asian and Hong Kong influenza outbreaks were deemed to have been relatively mild affairs and between them only caused some 3 million fatalities worldwide. By comparison, the 1918–19 Spanish influenza outbreak was considered to have been severe and it claimed the lives of an estimated 50 million victims – more than all the fatalities, both military and civilian combined, that resulted from the First World War.

      How do we know if we have influenza? Well, I have heard two explanations that answer that question – one example was clinical, the other was in layman’s terms. The former dictates that if you have a fever of 38 degrees Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit) or higher, you probably have the flu. If not, and you have no more than a mild fever, you are likely to be suffering with a cold. The other explanation went something like this. ‘Imagine you are in bed with influenza or perhaps a heavy cold and something entices you to go to the bedroom window and look out. In the garden you see hundreds of $100 bills blowing around. If you decide to go outside and collect them, you have probably got nothing more than a cold. However, if you ignore the money and just go back to bed, you probably have the flu.’

      Recent Business Continuity Institute surveys have demonstrated that the pandemic is a threat taken very seriously across all sectors. Moreover, with the UK Government deeming a pandemic as a ‘Tier One’ threat to the country’s economy and security, alongside terrorism, war, natural disasters and cyber threats, it does not get any higher than that. This also means that from a threat horizon scanning perspective, the pandemic threat is well and truly on the UK’s national radar, even though there are no certainties of when it might strike, or with what severity. Furthermore, the UK’s Civil Contingencies Act 2004 provides legislation that mandates, among other things, a level of pandemic preparedness across the component parts of the country’s critical national infrastructure. In fact, a serious pandemic outbreak affecting the UK is likely to be treated as a national emergency and the Act demands that validated contingency plans are in place at both national and regional levels. While the National Health Service will be expected to play a pivotal role, an emergency of this nature will also need to draw on the resources of other first responders.

      Most countries will maintain a national risk register (NRR) and many will have embraced the ISO31000 family of international standards for risk management to administer their respective NRRs. The UK’s NRR, as of 2015, is illustrated in Figure 1 and reveals what, at the time of publication, was believed to have the potential to become the most significant civil emergencies. This excludes terrorism and the cyber threat which are recorded separately.

      The NRR displays the overall relative impact score from 1 (Limited Impact) to 5 (Catastrophic Impact) in the ‘y’ axis and the relative likelihood of the event occurring within the next five years in the ‘x’ axis.

      Aside from terrorism and cyber threats, pandemics are the only threats to be currently allocated the maximum possible impact score of ‘5’. As the content in Figure 1 illustrates, pandemics have the potential for causing a catastrophic impact. Moreover, the threat has also been allocated a relative likelihood of occurrence within the next 5 years of between ‘1 in 20’ and ‘1 in 2’.

      Figure 1: Relative likelihood of occurring in the next 5 years

      Source: Cabinet Office, 2015, p. 13

      Figure 2: Evaluation diagram for mapping risk impact

      Source: Greater Manchester Prepared, 2014, p. 6

      "Pandemic influenza continues to represent the most significant civil emergency risk. The outbreak of H1N1 influenza in 2009 (‘swine flu’) did not match the severity of the scenario that we planned for and is not necessarily indicative of future pandemic influenzas. The 2009 H1N1 pandemic does not change the risk of another pandemic emerging (such as an H5N1 (‘avian flu’) pandemic) or mean that the severity of any future pandemics will be the same as the 2009 H1N1 outbreak." – Cabinet Office, 2015, p. 14

      With the responsibility of being the global watchdog against health threats, the World Health Organisation (WHO) advises us that we can expect more pandemics in the future. Unfortunately, the WHO is unable to tell us when they might strike, what form they might take, how severe they might be and what effect they might have on humans, birds and animals, or any combination of the three. History is there to remind us that pandemics have, on occasions, devastated the global population and their effects can be just as devastating on the bird and animal populations too.

      Influenza pandemics have been known to last for up to two years. Other types of pandemics can last longer. The HIV/AIDS pandemic has been with us now for more than three decades, having killed over 30 million to date, with an estimated 60 million globally that are continuing to live with the infection. That said, one positive aspect has been that the development of antiviral medication has resulted in HIV/AIDS now being considered to be more of a chronic disease, rather than a fatal condition.

      However, as if having to deal with the potential effects of a pandemic were not enough, what organisations must also remember is that during such an event there will be no moratorium on other types of incidents. For the likes of fires, floods, terrorism, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, cyber attacks, power failures and all other disruptive events, it will be business as usual. Consequently, organisations will need to be prepared to address these incidents with a workforce that is likely to have been already seriously decimated by a pandemic. Moreover, in some instances, the pandemic contagion may necessitate the closure of business premises for some form of sanitation or disinfection exercise, thereby creating a denial of access type of scenario.

      During my time as a consultant I have seen many business continuity plans, some of which have rather naively made the assumption that the entire workforce will be available to help deal with any incidents that might occur. Even under normal circumstances, this assumption is unrealistic, as employees could be absent for any one of a number of perfectly plausible reasons, such as vacation, sick leave, maternity/paternity leave, jury service, reserve armed forces training, etc. The list goes on and this is before we even consider those unofficial occasions when employees might, for example, ‘throw a sickie’. Moreover, whatever incident has occurred, it could have left employees injured, traumatised, or in a worst case scenario, perhaps even dead.

      To prove the point, if indeed the point needs proving, human resources departments should keep attendance records which in turn should be able to demonstrate just how many working days of the year that organisations have enjoyed full attendance. When I was the Resourcing Director for Fujitsu Consulting with responsibility for Northern Europe, I had a resource pool that numbered around 1,500 consultants. I used to work on the basis that at any time, on average, I would never have more than 80% of my resource pool available. In the middle of a pandemic trying to do its very worst, even assuming that I would achieve 80% resource availability would have been far too

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