Sally Furniss
Well-known member
Civil Defence and Emergency Management
Community Pandemic Planning Guide
Introduction
This guide is intended to assist your community to be able to meet its needs during a pandemic. The key to successful community emergency readiness is planning positively together. By making the time to read this guide you are taking a positive step toward ensuring that your community is as prepared as it can be.
What will this guide help me do?
Your community can begin to plan for an influenza pandemic now. Many of you have already started, with home and family plans. This guide is to help you work together as a community to address the issues that face all of us in a pandemic situation.
Why Plan for a Pandemic?
An outcome of effective community readiness and response to a pandemic will be a reduction in the demand on health, emergency response and social service organisations during an event, so that people in the most need are more likely to get assistance and support at critical times.
Planning is based around the following assumptions:
• There will be two or more “waves” of influenza infection 3-12 months apart
• Each “wave” will last up to 10 weeks
• Up to 40% of the population will be infected with influenza over the whole period of a pandemic
• Up to 2% of the those infected will die
• Medical and hospital facilities will be overwhelmed
• Planning will reduce the impact of the disease on the community.
Who needs to be involved in pandemic planning at the community level?
Health and emergency management planners agree that the key to effective responses to and recovery from emergency events such as pandemics relies on community members and groups assisting one-another – as the traditional response organisations will only be able to meet critical needs.
Much of the media coverage of potential consequences of an influenza pandemic may lead people to believe that they should stay away from work, avoid public places, public transport, and supermarkets and shops during a pandemic. Alongside this, health agencies predict that a maximum of around 40% of staff will be absent from workplaces during the peak of a pandemic.
Community-level pandemic planning will enable community life to continue and to recover to regular daily routines as soon as possible after a pandemic.
An effective community-level response to a pandemic will rely on enough members of each community gaining an adequate understanding of the likely impact on the community and what will be required to get the community through the event as unscathed and ready to recover as possible.
Who will help during a Pandemic
During a pandemic, everyone in the community will need to work together to help one another. There are some existing structures that can provide an organisational focus for planning – for example, an existing community-level Civil Defence organisation or Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) may form the basis of pandemic readiness and response in your community.
However not all communities have these organisations, and where they exist, arrangements don’t get right down to detailed community or neighbourhood readiness in all communities.
If a Civil Defence organisation or CERT is established at community level (ie, in your neighbourhood) it should be used as the basis for planning outlined in this guide. If they are not present, a new set of cooperative arrangements may need to be developed through the planning process provided for in this guide. In all cases a link to the Civil Defence Emergency Management office provided by your local council should be established through pandemic planning in your community.
Community Pandemic Planning Guide (condensed) Dec 06 (doc
396KB)
Community Pandemic Planning Guide (expanded) Dec 06 (doc 403KB)
Community Pandemic Planning Guide (condensed) Dec 06 (pdf
114KB )
Community Pandemic Planning Guide (expanded) Dec 06 (pdf 133KB)
Community Pandemic Planning Guide
Introduction
This guide is intended to assist your community to be able to meet its needs during a pandemic. The key to successful community emergency readiness is planning positively together. By making the time to read this guide you are taking a positive step toward ensuring that your community is as prepared as it can be.
What will this guide help me do?
Your community can begin to plan for an influenza pandemic now. Many of you have already started, with home and family plans. This guide is to help you work together as a community to address the issues that face all of us in a pandemic situation.
Why Plan for a Pandemic?
An outcome of effective community readiness and response to a pandemic will be a reduction in the demand on health, emergency response and social service organisations during an event, so that people in the most need are more likely to get assistance and support at critical times.
Planning is based around the following assumptions:
• There will be two or more “waves” of influenza infection 3-12 months apart
• Each “wave” will last up to 10 weeks
• Up to 40% of the population will be infected with influenza over the whole period of a pandemic
• Up to 2% of the those infected will die
• Medical and hospital facilities will be overwhelmed
• Planning will reduce the impact of the disease on the community.
Who needs to be involved in pandemic planning at the community level?
Health and emergency management planners agree that the key to effective responses to and recovery from emergency events such as pandemics relies on community members and groups assisting one-another – as the traditional response organisations will only be able to meet critical needs.
Much of the media coverage of potential consequences of an influenza pandemic may lead people to believe that they should stay away from work, avoid public places, public transport, and supermarkets and shops during a pandemic. Alongside this, health agencies predict that a maximum of around 40% of staff will be absent from workplaces during the peak of a pandemic.
Community-level pandemic planning will enable community life to continue and to recover to regular daily routines as soon as possible after a pandemic.
An effective community-level response to a pandemic will rely on enough members of each community gaining an adequate understanding of the likely impact on the community and what will be required to get the community through the event as unscathed and ready to recover as possible.
Who will help during a Pandemic
During a pandemic, everyone in the community will need to work together to help one another. There are some existing structures that can provide an organisational focus for planning – for example, an existing community-level Civil Defence organisation or Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) may form the basis of pandemic readiness and response in your community.
However not all communities have these organisations, and where they exist, arrangements don’t get right down to detailed community or neighbourhood readiness in all communities.
If a Civil Defence organisation or CERT is established at community level (ie, in your neighbourhood) it should be used as the basis for planning outlined in this guide. If they are not present, a new set of cooperative arrangements may need to be developed through the planning process provided for in this guide. In all cases a link to the Civil Defence Emergency Management office provided by your local council should be established through pandemic planning in your community.
Community Pandemic Planning Guide (condensed) Dec 06 (doc
396KB)Community Pandemic Planning Guide (expanded) Dec 06 (doc
403KB)Community Pandemic Planning Guide (condensed) Dec 06 (pdf
114KB )Community Pandemic Planning Guide (expanded) Dec 06 (pdf
133KB)