Before starting your Business Continuity Management (BCM) project for your Nursing Home, one of the initial vital steps is to have a good "Understanding of Your Organisation: Nursing Home". This is as required by the ISO 22301 BCMS standard so that your planning effort is in the context of business continuity management.
Nursing Home service providers perform a unique role in society, looking after the elderly, frail and vulnerable of all ages. It provides long-term care for seniors who cannot be cared for at home or in their community.
In the context of Nursing Home in Singapore, it is a long-term residential care facility. Nursing Home also assists residents who need help in most of their activities of daily living and have daily nursing care needs. With this role comes the unique responsibility of ensuring that those individuals entrusted to them receive the highest quality of care and are kept safe from harm. Hence, one of the initiatives is to ensure that the Nursing Home, if affected by a disruption or incident, can recover and resume its operations in the shortest possible and acceptable time.
The quality of that care is consequently monitored by several agencies in Singapore, including the Agency for Integrated Care (AIC) and the Ministry of Health (MoH). These bodies rightly focus on the quality of the care given to residents. Still, they also focus on the duty of social care providers to keep people safe and manage risks to individuals and the service provided.
The purpose of BCM for Nursing Home is to prepare owners and operators of aged care facilities on the issues that need to be considered to ensure a continuity of service to residents and clients during disruptions as a result of a disaster.
According to the ISO 22301 BCMS Standard, Business Continuity Management (Goh, 2015), or BCM is a “Holistic management process that identifies potential threats to an organization and the impacts to business operations those threats, if realized, might cause, and which provides a framework for building organizational resilience with the capability for an effective response that safeguards the interests of its key stakeholders, reputation, brand and value-creating activities."
Source: ISO 22301:2019 – Societal Security – Business Continuity Management Systems - Requirements - clause 3.4
This definition can be simplified as an organization-wide discipline and a complete set of processes identifying potential impacts that threaten an organization. It provides a capability for an effective response that safeguards the interests of its major stakeholders and reputation.
Business continuity management is about effectively planning and responding to potential or actual events and disasters that put organizations and people at risk.
The business continuity planning process allows nursing home owners, operators and service providers of aged care facilities to:
In the context of nursing homes, business continuity management is a complete set of processes that identifies potential impacts that threaten the nursing home and various aspects that the nursing home provides and manages.
It allows the nursing home, as an organisation, to be equipped to protect its reputation and deal with any incoming threats that may hinder its ability to perform its various daily tasks.
The BCM planning methodology, like any other planning process, provides a framework for requirements, effort, and deliverables, each phase leading into the next in an endlessly repeating cycle. The BCM Planning Methodology (Goh, 2015) is divided into various steps. The key is to divide the entire process such that it is manageable.
Within a Nursing Home context, a wide array of risks can be identified. One possible risk scenario is the loss of a building or IT system. The risk rating is determined based on the multiplication of the likelihood and impact. In addition to these factors, controls are often present to reduce risks. Because the facilities managed by the town can be geographically dispersed over a large area, the threats should be reviewed and analysed based on location.
Besides the direct services or "business functions" mandated as its core responsibilities as a Nursing Home, operating the Nursing Home should also include backroom business functions that may not be as obvious. Examples of such business functions should include Administration, Human Resources and Finance, which are not external facing. These functions are sometimes centralized or even outsourced; their identification and prioritization should be considered part of the BCM scope.
Whilst most parts of any business are considered critical, if an incident occurs at a residential care home, priority must be given to the restoration of the processes or services that are deemed to be critical to the safety and well-being firstly of the
residents and secondly of the staff.
For Nursing Homes, Critical Business Functions (CBFs) are defined as: “where the loss of delivery would endanger finances, damage the reputation of the Nursing Home in the eyes of customers, or seriously affect its ability to comply with legislation.” Some of the Nursing Homes Functions could derive from, but are not limited to, the following areas:
Once critical business functions are identified, it is time to develop interim recovery guidelines and procedures to allow the Nursing Home's business units to operate between the “time of disaster” and “ready for routine business.” There is a need to develop strategies to provide alternative facilities, and service providers and store backups of vital equipment and records in a safe place
Once the BC plan is documented, tests and exercises are carried out to ensure the BC plan works and its validity is proven. The plan from the plan development phase is run through simulations and ultimately graded based on criteria. If the results of a test or exercise are deemed to be unsatisfactory, any error or omission it might have will need to be corrected.
Finally, once the Nursing Home management team has approved the BC plan and the rest of the documentation, the assigned team will need to update and maintain the plan periodically to reflect organisational changes in the Nursing Home and prevailing threats in the environment.
As this blog is set in the context of the typical Singapore Nursing Home, there is a provision for training aligned to the planning methodology and approved as one of the key Singapore Workforce Skills Qualifications (WSQ). There is another funding from CITREP+ which IMDA supports.
BCM Institute (2008) Business Continuity (BCM) and Disaster Recovery (DR) Wiki Glossary, 9 Oct 2008. Available from <http://www.BCMpedia.org>
Goh, Moh Heng (2015): Business Continuity Management Dictionary Series – English, 5th Edition, 153 pages.
Goh, Moh Heng (2012): A Manager’s Guide to ISO22301 Standard for Business Continuity Management System, 120 pages.