Pandemic Planning Resources

It's been quite some time since the H1N1 pandemic has been the talk of the town in the emergency planning arena as well as in everyone's surrounding community.

At the current moment, we do know that countries such as China will be mass producing (or have already started) vaccines that may possibly minimise and hopefully eliminate the H1N1 strain of virus to some targetted groups of its population. Of course other major pharmacuetical companies are also still in perhaps the final testing phase.

While we await for a "cure" to fully crystallize, it is still important for emergency planners, business continuity specialists, as well as all relevant and responsible parties be aware of key resources that will enable them to better prepare and plan for a greater scale of outbreak in the near future.

As such, I've found the following link to be relatively comprehensive and useful for almost everyone to reference with, pertaining to pandemic planning:

Click Here for Pandemic Planning Resource

Always be prepared!

Jakarta New Bombings: Is Your Organisation Ready?

Despite past bombing events at Jakarta or in the Indonesian region, terrorists (as it seems to be for now) have once again struck a successful blow to the tourism industry at The Ritz Carlton, JW Marriots. All this taking place even with the current ramped up security and anti-terrorism measures by the country and the security agencies.

As this blog is being posted, I am being swamped with live radio and television broadcast reports provided by various terrorism experts on what actually happened in Indonesia today, and how all this tragic events could have happened once more.

Definitely very sad.

But what can we learn at the individual or even at the organisational level?

Regardless of where one lives in today, your country's security agency would have by now been ever more prepared for the eventuality of a terrorist strike. It's obvious from all these recent events that no country is spared.

This means that organisations residing in these coubtries would already have in place a certain form of business coninuity plan or currently embarking on a business continuity management journey. For some organisations, this would also be known as emergenecy planning or preparedness. Relevant plans should by now be put in place including the necessary infrastructure required to support such recovery operations.

As an indvidual, you should be familiar with the plans in place in your organisation, such as the faithful practising of annual fire evacuation drills and so on. Of course, there are other equally important procedures one should be familiar as well, to ensure your best chance of survival, as well as recovery to your organisation's business operations.

So, are you prepared?

National Level Exercise: Ex North Star VII

Singapore is currently working on a 3 day duration national level emergency management exercise, codenamed "Exercise North Star VII", which will see the involvement as well as actual deployment of various Home Front agencies (think Police and the Singapore Civil Defence Force).

Held annually to test the Home Front agencies' capabilities as well as response level, this series of exercise also aims to educate as well as seek the involvement of various strata of the common population. Such joint exercises will thus allow all involved agencies and government entities to better understand their own capabilities as well as seek improvement in their delivery standards in the event of a real crises.

So, what's this year's scenario based on? From what I roughly gather (thanks to my busy shift schedule) it will generally involve a "rouge" terrorist body moving across the island.

Judging by the level of planning involved, there's no denial that the responding agencies are definitely taking this whole nation-wide exercise seriously. How do I know? Well, while returning home from my night shift this morning, I was already caught in a 1 hour jam along a major expressway (for Singapore's traffic standard, that's rather long, considering our nation's geographical size). Look at the picture above, and you'll see (look carefully) a convoy of police patrol cars on the left lane, which I took from my Samsung PDA phone (not bad picture quality for a 2 mega-pixel unit, right?).

Stay tuned for more updates.

BCM Vs EM

BCM Vs EM. What's that?



If you're in the field of emergency management or emergency response long enough, you'd probably be able to guess that it literally means "Business Continuity Management versus Emergency Management". Nothing anymore complicated as that.

Have you ever come across situations where folks in our field (or maybe not) have been using these terms loosely? Having said that, is there actually a difference between these two?

For starters, we all know that Emergency Management typically resides in the field of "fast action" emergency response to a given hazard or crisis, and involves response plans and standard operating procedures for situations involving fires, floods, road traffic accidents, rescue operations, and so on (you get the idea). It is generally a subset or a niche in the management field pertaining to managing emergency response situations. Those in the EMT, fire and police organisations would be well aware of this definition and the exercises that come packaged with it.

Business Continuity Management on the other hand, has its roots starting from the commercial and banking industries, and typically involves an overall organisation-wide business continuity plan and requires various internal stakeholders as well as its associated vendors to provide a detailed response plan to support the organisation's critical business objectives (usually decided by senior management in advance). It conceptualizes that main objectives to be fulfilled by the organisation in times of identified crises such that its minimum servic edelivery standards will not be overly compromised.

In a nutshell, that's what these two fields of niche management are about. And if you're in the field of BC, you'll be well aware that "emergency management or response" will form part of your business continuity plan.

Business Continuity Management Framework: The Easy-To-Use, Comprehensive, Business Continuity Tool (third Edition, 2008)