Emergency Response and Business Continuity Planning

On an island, outside help can be hours away. A plan that works on paper in Malé may fail at a resort or an outer-island facility, where staff have to manage on their own until a boat or a seaplane can reach them, and seaplanes do not fly after dark.

Our leadership has led crisis response for an essential public service and kept a large workforce safe and working through the pandemic. We use that experience to write plans that people can follow under pressure.

What We Cover

• Emergency response plans for fire, medical emergencies, evacuation, a person in the water and severe weather
• Business continuity plans for power and water failures, supply disruption and the loss of key staff
• Roles, call trees and contact lists, with a routine for keeping them current
• Medical evacuation arrangements for day and night, agreed in advance with boat crews and the receiving hospital
• Tabletop exercises and drills, followed by a written debrief
• Training for emergency wardens, first aiders and response teams

What the Law and ISO 45001 Expect

The Workplace Safety and Health Act requires employers to have emergency procedures, and its 2024 regulation requires deaths, serious injuries and dangerous incidents to be reported within one hour. A plan should say who makes that report and how. ISO 45001 goes further, asking for the response to be tested and exercised and reviewed after every test and every real incident.

How We Write the Plans

We visit each site, work out the realistic time to get a casualty to a hospital that can treat them, and build the plan from there. We write the plans together with your managers, so that the people who will use them already know what is in them, and we finish with an exercise to test them.

Our article on emergency planning for island workplaces explains the approach in more detail.