Business Continuity Planning for Healthcare Facilities Training Course

Course overview

Healthcare facilities cannot pause safely when utilities fail, clinical systems become unavailable, a cyber incident disrupts records, severe weather limits access, or staff shortages affect critical services. Leaders must make defensible decisions about which patient services continue, which can be reduced, where patients are transferred, and how recovery is coordinated across clinical, facilities, IT, pharmacy, supply chain and external agencies. This course equips participants to turn emergency-response intentions into a tested business continuity capability that protects patient safety, regulatory obligations and operational resilience.

Participants learn to build and maintain a healthcare business continuity management system using ISO 22301 principles, healthcare incident command arrangements and practical continuity-planning tools. They conduct a business impact analysis, identify critical clinical and non-clinical dependencies, set recovery time and recovery point objectives, assess disruption scenarios, and define continuity and recovery strategies. The course addresses downtime procedures for electronic health records, utilities disruption, loss of key suppliers, infectious-disease surges, evacuation, communications and alternate-care arrangements.

Delivery combines instructor-led technical sessions with healthcare case studies, facilitated planning workshops and scenario-based tabletop exercises. Participants work with a continuity-plan template, BIA worksheets, incident action plan formats and exercise evaluation materials. By the end of the week, each participant leaves with a practical healthcare continuity-plan pack: a scoped BIA, service-priority matrix, disruption response playbooks, recovery actions, communications arrangements and a 90-day implementation plan ready to adapt for their facility.

The programme is suited to professionals who own continuity, emergency preparedness, clinical operations, facilities, IT resilience or risk responsibilities in hospitals, clinics, laboratories, long-term care providers and integrated health systems.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Conduct a healthcare business impact analysis using critical-service, dependency and consequence criteria
• Classify clinical and support services into recovery priorities with documented recovery time objectives
• Map people, premises, technology, supplier and utility dependencies for essential patient-care pathways
• Assess disruption scenarios using a likelihood, impact and control-effectiveness risk matrix
• Draft continuity strategies for electronic health record downtime, utility loss, staffing shortages and supplier failure
• Apply Hospital Incident Command System structures to continuity escalation and recovery decision-making
• Create role-based continuity playbooks, notification scripts and internal-external communications procedures
• Design and evaluate a healthcare tabletop exercise using HSEEP objectives, injects and improvement actions

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• Business Continuity Managers — who need to establish or strengthen facility-level continuity plans and testing programmes
• Emergency Preparedness and Disaster Management Officers — who must connect incident response arrangements with sustained service recovery
• Hospital and Clinic Operations Managers — who determine how essential services continue during disruptive events
• Health, Safety and Environment Managers — who coordinate organisational resilience, emergency controls and assurance activity
• Facilities and Engineering Managers — who manage utility, building-system and alternate-site dependencies affecting patient care
• Healthcare IT and Clinical Informatics Managers — who own digital-service resilience and electronic health record downtime procedures

Requirements and prerequisites

This is a foundation-to-intermediate course. Participants should understand their facility’s main clinical and support services and have basic familiarity with local emergency procedures, reporting lines and risk registers. Experience in healthcare operations, safety, facilities, IT, quality, emergency preparedness or risk management is useful but not essential. Participants should be able to work with spreadsheets and word-processing templates, as BIA and continuity-plan exercises use structured worksheets. No previous ISO 22301 qualification, formal business continuity certification, incident command training or specialist resilience software is required. Complete beginners should expect to learn the core terminology before applying it to healthcare scenarios.

Training methodology

The instructor uses short technical briefings to introduce ISO 22301, healthcare continuity planning and incident-command concepts, then moves participants into facilitated application. Teams analyse a hospital disruption case, complete BIA and dependency-mapping worksheets, draft downtime and recovery playbooks, and make decisions through a timed tabletop exercise. Peer review is used to test whether plans are usable by clinical and support teams under pressure. On the final day, participants convert their workshop outputs into a prioritised 90-day implementation plan for their own facility.

Course outline

Day 1: Healthcare continuity foundations and governance

• Business continuity management system principles under ISO 22301
• Distinction between emergency response, crisis management and business continuity
• Healthcare regulatory, patient-safety and duty-of-care continuity obligations
• Critical clinical services and enabling-service identification
• Continuity governance roles, executive sponsorship and plan ownership
• Hospital Incident Command System integration points
• Continuity-plan architecture, document control and review cycles

Workshop: Participants scope a continuity-management system for a model hospital and produce a governance map showing accountable owners, escalation routes and plan interfaces.

Day 2: Business impact analysis and dependency mapping

• Healthcare business impact analysis methodology and interview planning
• Patient-safety, clinical, financial, legal and reputational impact criteria
• Maximum tolerable period of disruption and recovery time objective setting
• Recovery point objectives for clinical data and digital records
• Service-priority matrices for emergency, inpatient, diagnostic and support functions
• People, premises, technology, information and supplier dependency mapping
• BIA validation workshops and evidence recording

Workshop: Participants complete a BIA for a selected clinical service and produce a ranked service-priority matrix with recovery objectives and key dependencies.

Day 3: Continuity strategies and operational playbooks

• Scenario analysis for utility failure, cyber disruption and extreme weather
• Electronic health record downtime and data-reconciliation procedures
• Clinical staffing resilience, redeployment and mutual-aid arrangements
• Alternate care locations, patient transfer and service relocation strategies
• Medical supply, pharmaceutical and laboratory supplier continuity controls
• Utility resilience for power, water, medical gas and HVAC systems
• Role-based continuity playbooks and activation checklists

Workshop: Teams develop a disruption response playbook for an electronic health record outage, including activation criteria, paper workflows, communications and recovery actions.

Day 4: Communications, incident command and exercising

• Continuity activation thresholds and incident-command handover decisions
• Incident action plans and operational-period objectives
• Stakeholder notification trees and call-out escalation procedures
• Patient, family, staff, regulator and media communication considerations
• Tabletop exercise design using HSEEP exercise objectives
• Scenario injects, decision logs and facilitator control methods
• After-action reports and corrective-action tracking

Workshop: Participants run a facilitated tabletop exercise for a prolonged hospital power outage and produce a decision log, after-action findings and corrective-action register.

Day 5: Plan assurance, recovery and implementation

• Recovery sequencing and return-to-normal operating criteria
• Post-incident service restoration and backlog-management planning
• Continuity-plan validation, maintenance and annual review schedules
• Supplier assurance questions and continuity evidence requirements
• Performance indicators for continuity capability and exercise follow-up
• Audit-ready records aligned to ISO 22301 requirements
• Ninety-day healthcare continuity implementation roadmap

Workshop: Participants assemble their healthcare continuity-plan pack and present a 90-day implementation roadmap with named owners, milestones and assurance measures.

Tools & standards covered

ISO 22301:2019, ISO 22313:2020, Hospital Incident Command System (HICS), Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program (HSEEP)

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions