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Weekly UpdatesThe World Health Organization declared on June 11 that the current HIN1 outbreak has reached Phase 6. The swine flu has gone big time.
For businesses, Phase 6 is the last alarm bell.
"It needs to be considered a final call for pandemic preparedness," said Dr. Joan Pfinsgraff, director of health intelligence at i JET, a business-resiliency specialist.
Companies need to use the opportunity to evaluate how their preparedness plan has held up so far. Have your office hygiene and cleaning practices been stepped up? Have you reviewed your sick policy, leave policy, travel policy, work-from-home policy and any other policy that involves employees coming and going? Is your IT system ready to handle more employees staying away from the office?
Organizations must also have plans in place to maintain a chain of command for each department and location, no matter how many employees go down.
"So there is always someone there to be the leader," she said.
And decisions should have been made as to what is mission critical-in terms of people skills, travel, facilities and products.
To be honest, companies should have tackled these questions when the WHO declared Phases 4 and 5.
But if you haven't yet put into place a pandemic preparedness plan--which was the case for 43 percent of respondents in a recent survey, now's not the time to panic.
PHASE 6: HEALTH IMPACT
Let's not let unprepared employers off the hook too much however. The WHO announcement of Phase 6 is not really news.
The conditions of a pandemic have existed for weeks now, according to Dr. Andrew Coburn, vice president of catastrophe research at insurance modeler Risk Management Solutions Inc., which owns a proprietary pandemic model. WHO phases are based strictly on the spread of the disease, not severity. Community outbreaks must occur in at least one country in two or more WHO world regions for it to be officially defined as Phase 6.
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