I am conducting a study of the emergency preparedness of NHS Acute Trusts in England. I am using the emergency and disaster management module of the Hospital Safety Index checklist of the World Health Organisation. The study is part of an MSc in Crisis & Disaster Management at the University of Portsmouth.
Under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, I am writing to request the following information. This information relates to the NHS England Emergency Preparedness, Resilience and Response Framework in general and section 12, “Incident response”, subsection 7, “Staff welfare”, and subsection 8, “On-call staff”, in particular.
This information should be readily available as part of the NHS EPRR annual assurance process.
Please note that this is a different request from my previous requests: “EPRR Coordination of emergency and disaster management activities”, “EPRR Planning” and “EPRR Communication and information management”.
For clarity, to minimise the cost of my request and to prevent the disclosure of any sensitive information, I have enumerated the information I am requesting and specified how it could be provided.
Please note that much of the information requested is only records of the existence of a list, procedures, rosters, training, exercises, spaces and measures and not the contents of the list, procedures, rosters, training, exercises spaces and measures themselves.
Given the potentially sensitive nature of this information, I ask you to redact any exempt information instead of refusing disclosure. This would be in accordance with guidance on best practice from the Information Commissioner’s Office.
If you do not hold some of this information then I ask you to confirm explicitly that you do not hold it.
Human resources
Staff contact list
1. Any record of the existence of a current contact list of all hospital personnel which is available and is accessible to hospital administrators and staff of any Incident Coordination Centre. (Can be answered yes / no.)
2. The date(s) of the most recent update(s) of such a contact list. (Can be answered with a date or dates.)
Mobilization and recruitment of personnel during an emergency or disaster
3. Any record of the existence of procedure(s) for the mobilization of existing on-duty and off-duty staff to meet surge capacity needs of clinical and support services in response to emergencies or disasters. (Can be answered yes / no.)
4. Any record of the existence of procedure(s) for recruitment and training of extra personnel and volunteers to meet surge capacity needs of clinical and support services in response to emergencies or disasters. (Can be answered yes / no.)
5. Any record of the existence of emergency rosters of staff who can be mobilised to meet surge capacity needs of clinical and support services in response to emergencies or disasters. (Can be answered yes / no.)
Duties assigned to personnel for emergency or disaster response and recovery
6. Any record of whether all key personnel in any hospital incident management system for command, control and coordination in an emergency or disaster response have received training in incident management. (Can be answered yes / no.)
7. If such training is received then any record of whether training or an exercise has been conducted for all such key personnel at least annually. (Can be answered yes / no.)
Well-being of hospital personnel during an emergency or disaster
8. Any record of the existence of designated spaces and available measures for hospital personnel to rest, sleep, eat, drink, observe faith-based practices and meet personal needs during an emergency. (Can be answered yes / no.)
9. Any record of for how long these measures can be sustained. (Can be answered in hours or days.)
