Most emergency plans are written as if an ambulance will turn up in ten minutes. On a resort, a fish processing plant on an outer island or a vessel crossing between atolls, that is not how it goes. The nearest hospital that can treat a serious injury may be a speedboat ride or a domestic flight away, and the weather decides whether either can leave. Your own people will handle the first hour, and sometimes much longer.
Start from the travel time
Before you write anything, work out how long it takes to get a badly injured person from your site to a hospital that can treat them. Do it for daylight and for night, and for calm and rough seas. Find out which hospital that actually is. An island health centre can stabilise a patient, but serious burns or head injuries may need a regional hospital or Malé.
Write that time at the top of the plan. Most of the decisions below depend on it.
Decide what your staff must be able to do alone
If help is two hours away, someone on your team has to keep a casualty alive for two hours. That changes what you train people to do. For most island sites the list looks something like this:
- first aid and CPR, with enough trained people to cover every shift, nights included
- stopping heavy bleeding and treating burns, with the right equipment kept where it is needed
- putting out a small fire in the first minutes, and knowing when to stop and get everyone out
- getting a person out of the water safely
- keeping in touch with the boat, the receiving hospital and the authorities while the response goes on
Know who to call, and put it on the wall
The national emergency numbers are 119 for the police, 102 for an ambulance, 118 for the fire service and 191 for the coast guard. On many islands the first useful call is closer to home: the island health centre, the island council, or your own boat captain.
Post the numbers where people will see them, together with the name of the island and the words a caller should use to describe your location. People forget their own address under stress, and a villa number means nothing to someone on the other end of the phone.
Plan for the boat, the weather and the night
Moving a patient off an island usually means a boat, a seaplane or both. Agree in advance who decides that a patient has to leave, who takes the boat, who travels with the patient and what goes with them. Seaplanes do not fly after dark, so the night plan will be different from the day plan.
Weather matters in the same way. The Maldives Meteorological Service issues alerts for strong winds and rough seas, and those are the days when a crossing is slowest and most dangerous. Your plan should say what changes while an alert is in force: which activities stop, whether you roster extra first aiders, and when to move a patient early, before the sea gets worse.
What ISO 45001 asks for
Clause 8.2 of ISO 45001 deals with emergency preparedness. It asks an organisation to plan its response to emergencies, including first aid, to train people in that response, and to test and exercise it from time to time. The plan has to be reviewed after tests and after real incidents, and the relevant information has to reach workers, contractors, visitors and the emergency services.
You do not need to be seeking certification to use that as a checklist. The Workplace Safety and Health Act (Law No. 2/2024) requires employers to have emergency procedures, and a plan that has been tested is good evidence that you have acted on that duty. Our article on where to start with the Act covers the first steps.
Test it on a table first
A full drill is the real test, but it is disruptive and costly, so many plans never get one. A tabletop exercise is a cheaper place to start. Managers and team leaders sit together and talk through a realistic incident as it unfolds: a guest goes missing while snorkelling, a kitchen fire spreads to staff housing at two in the morning, a contractor falls from scaffolding on a new villa block, or the main generator fails during a storm.
The gaps tend to appear within twenty minutes. A phone number nobody has. A boat key that lives in one person's pocket. A first aid kit that was used last month and never restocked. Two managers who each assume the other will call the hospital. Write them down, fix them, then run a live drill on the parts that matter most.
We write emergency response plans for island sites and run tabletop exercises for management teams, at your premises or in Malé.
This article is general information, not legal advice.