Pandemic planning: a business continuity success story
Although it is true that at European Parliament level there has been some concern about the level of expenditure on pandemic preparation and the (arguably) over-reaction on the part of the WHO and various EU Agencies, this is not the view across Europe from those professionals directly involved. Last week in Brussels, the incoming Belgian Presidency organised a very comprehensive conference on the theme of “Lessons Learned from the influenza pandemic” which was chaired by Belgian Deputy Prime Minister. It included major contributions from the Special Adviser to the WHO Director General, the European Commissioner for Health and the Director General for Health in France. Amongst the other specialist speakers, which included myself representing the Business Continuity Institute, were people who had major responsibilities for the crisis across the various EU territories. In fact it was attended by around 250 people and the only negative voices came from attending Members of the European Parliament. Now you can argue that this is the role of the parliament, to provide checks and balances against the vested interests of the professionals. However the point I made in my presentation was that “you cannot judge the quality of a decision by its outcome, you can only judge it by determining it was rational, appropriate and proportionate given the facts known at the point it had to be made”. The health experts did not know the likely severity, so how could politicians who had to make the decisions and business continuity or emergency planners who had to implement them. In fact the full impact of a realised threat was not felt and this should be a cause for celebration. We have learned more about how communications and inter country and sector relationships can be better coordinated and the WHO have also been able to reassess their processes. Admittedly pharmaceutical companies have made a lot of unexpected profits but that is hardly their fault. What would have happened to their reputation if they had refused to gear up anti-viral and vaccine production and thousands more people had died? That would have hardly have improved their ethical business reputation. Overall I think the business continuity management community across Europe made a good job of a difficult situation. If any blame is to be laid, it is on those consultants and planners who rigidly tied their local plans to changes in WHO levels. This was always a naïve approach which failed a basic tenet of business continuity management - plans have to be flexible enough to deal with actual conditions not theoretical assumptions. If every time a potential serious event (pandemic, volcanic ash, even Y2K) is treated as a waste of time and money if things don’t go horribly wrong, we will never get business continuity management taken seriously. The prime purpose of business continuity is to STOP the worst impact of unexpected events being realised, not to dash around in panic dealing with a crisis. The lack of massive loss of life, infrastructure destruction or business failure is a business continuity SUCCESS. Contact: Lyndon Bird FBCI
•Date: 7th July 2010 • Region: Various •Type: Article •Topic: Pandemic planning |
