Introduction to emergency management

Emergencies and disasters that may impact your practice and community will either be of natural or manmade origin.

Examples of natural hazards that may result in emergencies and disasters include:

• floods (riverine and flash floods),
• bushfires,
• heat waves,
• cyclones,
• pandemics, and
• severe wind and snow events.

Note: A hazard is an event that has potential to cause an emergency or disaster. Not all hazards result in an emergency or disaster.

Examples of manmade emergencies and disasters include:

• loss of power or safe water supply (i.e. from technological failure),
• significant communications outages,
• cyberattacks or IT system failures,
• mass casualty events (i.e. train derailments, violent acts),
• terrorism,
• premises fire, and
• a significant road, bridge or transport infrastructure closure.

Pandemics and communicable disease outbreaks should also be considered as part of your emergency and disaster planning. While they are touched upon in this resource, specific and detailed resources are available to assist your practice’s planning and preparedness in this domain. Visit the RACGP’s Managing pandemics webpage to find out more.

Your team

Your practice team members may be impacted by an emergency or disaster in varying ways. For example, they may be affected:

• personally/directly by an event,
• by inaccessibility of the practice (e.g., road/infrastructure closure),
• whilst in your practice managing and assisting patients who have been affected by an event,
• while caring for people at an evacuation center, hospital or other surgery,
• during the recovery phase following an event, or
• occasionally as responders at the site of an event.

When developing your emergency response plan, remember that each of your team members may be experiencing different levels of distress, depending on an individual’s personality or characteristics, unique experience of the event, and the role they perform at your practice. Be aware of support services that your team can reach out to, should they need to.

Something else to keep in mind is that you may not have your usual full team available. Consider how your practice will continue to operate with less team members than usual. 

Your business

Emergencies and disasters can impact your business by affecting your premises and resources required to function as a business. In example, disasters can cause:

• minor or major damage to your building’s infrastructure,
• loss of utilities (i.e., water, electricity, internet, communication channels),
• loss of access to or destruction of key information (i.e., patient records),
• increased or decreased demand for your services,
• loss of critical equipment and supplies,
• lack of access to other health services (i.e., pharmacy, pathology, ambulance),
• loss of income, or
• business disruption or closure.

Waiting until an emergency occurs to identify how to respond is neither effective, nor recommended.

Instead, your practice should consider having an up-to-date, practiced and accessible emergency response plan that is ready to implement when an event occurs. This way, business continuity is more likely to be ensured, allowing your practice to continue providing essential services to the impacted community and generate income in a sustained manner. 

Having a practiced plan in place will allow you to:

• protect the physical and mental health and livelihoods of your team and patients,
• protect your practice infrastructure and data, and
• sustain the ability to provide services and continue to operate as a business within your community. 

It is common and natural for people to experience high levels of distress in response to a disaster. However, having a good understanding of what may occur during and after a disaster, as well as actions your team can take to decrease any sense of helplessness, can assist in decreasing people’s distress levels.²

Developing and then practicing an emergency response plan will help your team to psychologically prepare for a disaster, increasing their confidence and the likelihood that they will respond effectively in a real emergency scenario.

Having an emergency response plan in place will also help to ensure business resilience by reducing liability and financial loss due to damages sustained during a disaster, or from being disrupted from usual business due to a form of emergency.

The aim is to stay operational before, during and after an event and to do so, you will need to understand how your business may be affected and what you can do to either remain or get back on track as quickly as possible.

GPs play a vital role in supporting communities before, during and after disasters and emergencies. An integral part of this role is to maintain continuity of care where it is safe to do so. 

GPs in areas affected by disasters may not only see increases in people presenting with health issues immediately after an event, but also in the weeks, months and years following that event.

While most people recover fully from disasters, evidence shows that disasters can have short, medium and long-term effects on people’s physical and mental health and can exacerbate pre-existing conditions. Most people experiencing health issues in response to a disaster will initially present to a GP, if able.

Alternatively, depending on the type of event that has occurred, GPs may see a decrease in presenting patients during and after an event. A decrease in presentations can happen for many reasons, such as people needing to relocate or people losing essential equipment and vehicles. GPs and practices must be prepared for either possibility.

Historically, general practice has not been well integrated into emergency planning, nor effectively utilised.

However, work to improve systems of integration is increasing. Through ongoing and consistent advocacy by the RACGP improvements have been seen in this space. The RACGP continues to call on the Australian Federal and State and Territory governments to implement recommendations to recognise and support the role of general practices before, during and after emergency or disaster events. These calls are outlined in the RACGP’s position statement on The role of general practitioners in disasters and emergencies.