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Thoughts on succession planning and other emergency management emanations

Hospital Safety Insider, April 25, 2018

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Editor's note: This was originally published on Steve MacArthur's blog, Mac's Safety Space.

Lately, as I field questions from folks regarding potential survey vulnerabilities relating to emergency management, I keep coming back to the importance of succession planning. And, interestingly enough, I’ve found that succession planning can have a very big impact on other processes in the physical environment.

Certainly, the most critical aspect of succession planning revolves around ensuring that you have sufficient numbers of prepared competent incident command staff. In this age of frequent shifts in organizational leadership, etc., you can hit some really lean times when it comes to having appropriately knowledgeable folks in the bunker with you during emergency response activities.

And with this recent spate of emergency response activations lasting days instead of hours and weeks instead of days, you really need to have enough bench strength to move folks in and out of roles, getting them a little downtime, etc. I think it is only natural(ly unnatural) to rely on a fairly finite cadre of individuals who you know can “bring it,” regardless of what’s going on, but I think the challenge as we move forward is to expand on those core folks and move towards access to incident command staff across all shifts. If you think of it in terms of a basic continuity of operations plan (after all, you need folks to be able to continue operations), a seamless philosophy, etc., would seem the best strategy.

And, to that end, I have a question for you folks out there in radioland — do you have a standardized approach to providing education to your incident command folks? Is it the basic FEMA and associated stuff? Or have you found something else? I’d be really keen to hear what you’re doing to ensure reasonable competence, etc., in your response activities.

Another way in which succession planning can have an impact on general compliance are those instances in which critical processes are “owned” by one individual in an organization. And when that individual takes time off, or even leaves the organization, sometimes the stuff they were doing falls through the cracks. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve run into instances when eyewash checks, fire pump tests, preventive maintenance for equipment, etc., went undone because the person responsible didn’t (or wasn’t able to) make a handoff. As you can probably figure out, surveyors are not going to look too kindly upon these kinds of gaps and with the threshold for findings being at such a low point, you really only need a couple of “drops” before you’re looking at survey troubles.

I would imagine that those of you with work order systems can engineer a failsafe into the process so if someone is off, it’s easy to discern that the activity needs to be reassigned. But what if you pay to send someone to school to learn how to maintain a certain piece (or pieces) of equipment and that individual leaves the organization and you (potentially) without a service contract for the equipment in question because you brought it in house? These are all real life examples of how the best laid plans of facilities/safety professionals can go astray. Specialized knowledge and skill is rather a premium at the moment and you want to be sure you have processes in place that will withstand attrition (in all its glories).

Next week, I want to talk a little bit about how folks are managing construction projects. You know me: I never miss an opportunity for some ponderings...

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