Business Continuity Plans In Social Care - What's the Best Approach?

How to Plan, Do, Review and Revise

To start your business continuity plan, you should assign roles to your staff so you know who will be responsible for developing, checking and maintaining your plan. You should think about who you should work with to produce your plan, as this will help the plan accurately reflect everyone’s needs and the business's needs. It will also ensure it works from a practical perspective.

Once you have assigned the right roles for each individual and chosen a suitable co-producer, you should think about the potential disruptions your service may experience and carry out a risk assessment on these issues. This should reflect the terms of likelihood and impact. The best way to determine what risks you should address first is by using a RAG (Red-Amber-Green) rating that should be kept under review.

When your risks have been determined, you need to create actions to reduce them from occurring or to mitigate them if they do happen. Make sure the plan links with your local authority’s emergency plan. The next step is to implement your actions and practice the plan, so you can see what was and wasn’t effective. Then you will need to repeat your plan, do, review and revise cycle again to improve it.

Risk Assessments

Carrying out risk assessments in health and social care when putting your business continuity plan together will highlight the key business functions and events that could lead to disruptions to everyday business processes, or potential adverse consequences for staff or people you care for Some examples include a flood or fire, lack of staff, equipment failure, a new disease/major pandemic or financial problems (to name a few).

A risk assessment will be able to show the potential impact of the disruptions and how long it takes to recover from the problem. Every business will have different risks to worry about, so having a contingency plan will compare the key differences in accommodation-based services and community services in people’s homes.

Business Continuity Plan for Residential Care Homes

The type of care service you are creating your business continuity plan for will determine the severity of each risk and the best way to overcome these problems if you end up facing them. However, whether you’re running a care home, a domiciliary care business, or any other social care service, the steps to follow when creating your plan will be the same.

Once you have successfully completed the plan, do, review and revise steps, the CQC (or Care Inspectorate Wales, Care Inspectorate Scotland or RQIA) and commissioners will expect care services to put an up-to-date, tested and effective business continuity plan in place. This will need to be proven to sustain the effective and safe delivery of care and support to your service users during times of disruption. This can be achieved by having a lead person responsible for developing reviewing and updating your business continuity plan.

You should decide on how often you should review the plan, which must include keeping on top of changing national and local government advice or guidance, alongside information that your regulators have released that could impact your plan. You should also look at key personnel changes that could lead to your plan needing an update.

Once an update has taken place, you should share your plan with the relevant staff and make sure they know where it’s kept in case of emergency. Your team should fully understand how it works, when to activate it and the people responsible for doing what. All staff, including out-of-office staff, must be fully trained on your arrangements, so they can feel prepared and confident in following the steps if needed.

Business Continuity: Steps To Follow

To summarise, your key priority when it comes to business continuity planning and regulations is to keep people as safe as you possibly can while providing continuity of services during disruption. To successfully achieve this, you must:

• Identify the person who is responsible for writing, maintaining and reviewing the business plan.
• Identify the key risks that can affect the continuity of your organisation.
• Consider the potential impacts these risks could have on your business, whether they occur on their own or combined.
• Identify additional preventative and mitigating controls and resources.
• Develop business continuity plans based on the risks/identified impact, and resources you can use to mitigate these risks and maintain the continuity of your service.
• Decide where to keep your plan and how your staff can impact it in case of an emergency.
• Test and update your plans regularly.
• Make sure you have adequate and suitable insurance in place.
• Ensure you notify the CQC of any notifiable incidents.
• Identify and link your plan to local authority and government major incident planning, including emails, websites, contact details, existing plans and documents.

Following CQC Regulations

Under Regulation 18: Notification of other incidents, providers must notify the CQC of all incidents that could have an effect on the health, safety and welfare of service users, including:

• Any event which appears to the service provider is likely to threaten to prevent the service provider’s ability to continue to carry on the regulated activity safely or follow the registration requirements.
• An insufficient number of suitably qualified, skilled and experienced persons are being employed to carry out the regulated activity.
• An interruption in the supply to premises owned or used by the service provider to carry on the regulated activity of electricity, gas, water or sewage, where that interruption has lasted for longer than a continuous period of 24 hours.
• Physical damage to premises owned or used by the service provider to carry on the regulated activity which has, or is likely to have, a detrimental effect on the treatment or care provided to service users.
• The failure or malfunction of fire alarms or other safety devices in premises owned or used by the service provider for the purposes of carrying on the regulated activity, where that failure or malfunction has lasted for longer than a continuous period of 24 hours.

Maintain CQC Business Continuity Plan

Keeping on top of your business continuity plan and updating it when necessary is key to having an efficient and effective response to disruptions and emergencies in your care service. It can also help you improve your CQC (or the relevant independent regulator of health and adult social care in your country) compliance and rating..

Our A-Z of Regulation and Compliance guide has been created to disentangle key information from the jargon and cut through vague statements to help you gain clarity on what you should be doing in your care service. Check out Issue 2: B is for Business Continuity here. It gives you a more in depth look at business continuity plans in social care to help you create your own robust plans for your service.

A great way to maintain your plan and regulations simply and securely is to use care software. To help you, we at The Access Group, have a unique suite of care software that contains everything you need to improve the way you manage your care business. This includes specific apps to make it easier to manage your policies and procedures, conduct mock inspections, improve auditing and more.

Access Policies and Procedures is a digital platform that contains updated and expertly written policies and procedures your care service needs to ensure ongoing CQC compliance and business continuity. Contact us today for more information or to book a demo.