Formulating the Contingency Plans for an Outpatient Surgical Center

Formulating the Contingency Plans for an Outpatient Surgical Center

Introduction

Contingency Plan

A contingency plan, also called risk planning, or business continuity plan or disaster recovery plan, aims to describe the measures to be taken by a company, including the activation of manual processes to make their vital processes return to work fully, or in a state minimally acceptable, as quickly as possible, thus avoiding prolonged downtime that can generate greater losses to the corporation, such as:

the escape of shareholders,

large revenue losses,

government sanctions,

legal problems for managers,

approaches malicious media,

leakage to competitors and officials

In extreme cases, closure of the company (Swayne et.al, 2006).

Given the importance of this process costs should be included in the scope of new projects. Contingency Plan is a document where are defined the responsibilities set out in an organization, to meet an emergency and also contain detailed information on the characteristics of the area or systems involved. It is a document developed in order to train, mentor, facilitate, streamline and standardize the actions necessary to combat and control responses to unusual occurrences (Swayne et.al, 2006).

Common Causes

The most common incidents that cause the contingency in the area of systems are floods , fires , riots , strikes , earthquakes , tsunamis , hurricanes , power outages, attacks by hackers internal (malicious employees or consultants) or external, computer viruses , leakage chemical, sabotage , terrorist attacks , accidents and human errors (Raghupathi & Tan, 2002).

Contingency plans should focus on incidents most likely not catastrophic in that normally are less likely to happen. Additionally, certain types of faults with high probability of occurrence can include: the type and duration of its effects, not justifying any contingency measure (Raghupathi & Tan, 2002).

Formulating the Contingency Plans for an Outpatient Surgical Center

The contingency plan should be developed involving all areas prone to disasters. Both the operational processes of the outpatient surgical center as well as the computer systems in place would be considered when formulating the contingency plan.

All used items in the processes should be documented and updates to this documentation should be made whenever necessary. Periodic tests in the plan are also required to verify that the process is still valid. The detailed measures should only be needed for its rapid implementation without too much information that can be harmful in a critical situation (Swayne et.al, 2006).

The simplest contingency procedures are keeping regular backups of databases, maintain a 'contingency site' to date, have reliable tools to access data remotely in case of failure to reach the building company (VPN or dial-up, for example), and have complete copies of updated servers vital to the operation of the company (especially those that require long reconstruction), keep passwords in a secure but easy access to key personnel of the company in case of an emergency (Swayne et.al, 2012)

A more elaborate contingency plan usually has a high cost, it involves allocation of people and underutilized redundant hardware, etc.. Normally to reduce costs and given just enough to keep the vital services of ...