Business and Service Continuity Planning

The ability to ensure that critical services and functions can continue to operate following an incident that causes serious disruption is a vital element of Primary Care. To ensure that Southwark Health & Social Care has this ability, it has successfully developed a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) also known as a Service Continuity Plan, which fulfils one of its responsibilities as a Category 1 Responder under the Civil Contingencies Act.

The BCP uses the same incident notification and response structure and procedures as the Emergency Plan, and is designed to cater for an incident that affects the organisation’s own operations, providing continuity of service for critical functions and enabling non-critical functions to be recovered in a controlled manner.

Developing a BCP does not have to be a difficult and time consuming exercise, although you will have to identify and document a certain amount of information and think about how you would respond to serious disruption. The format and much of the content of your BCP though, can be obtained by using a well-designed and suitable template. Developing the BCP from the template should be a straightforward exercise.

If you’d like to find out more about how to develop your BCP, then please contact Nick Vincent, Emergency Planning Manager or download the free guide below.

Public Health Dept 
160 Tooley Street

London

SE12TZ 

020 7525 0292
nick.vincent@southwarkpct.nhs.uk