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The NHS Resilience and Business Continuity Management Guidance 2008: interim strategic national guidance for NHS organisations

The purpose of this best practice guidance is to give National Health Service (NHS) organisations support in developing and refining Business Continuity Management (BCM) processes.

This Guidance has been prepared under the auspices of the Department of Health’s NHS Resilience Project with expert input of a workshop event that met in London in November 2007.

This is interim guidance and will be developed, refined and revised.

The aim of this interim guidance is to:

• Improve resilience within the NHS
• ensure through the adoption of resilience principles the continuous operational delivery of healthcare services when faced with a range of disruptive challenges e.g. staff shortages, denial of access, failures in technology, loss of utility services and failure of key suppliers.
• help drive NHS compliance with the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 (CCA 2004)
• Allow a unified and cohesive approach to BCM which parallels the new British Standard BS25999,, and
• develop a resilient healthcare system which can be benchmarked against other similar sized organisations.

We would welcome your views on this guidance and its usefulness to NHS organisations in fulfilling their statutory requirements. A questionnaire for consultation, on which we would be grateful for the views of stakeholders, is attached below.

This consultation follows the revised Cabinet Office code of practice which is available from the Cabinet Office website.  Annex A on the consultation pro forma gives details of the criteria being followed.

• Download The NHS Resilience and Business Continuity Management Guidance 2008: interim strategic national guidance for NHS organisations (PDF, 660K)
• Download Initial scoping assessment and action plan (PDF, 91K)