Emergency Preparedness, Resilience and Response

The NHS needs to plan for, and respond to, a wide range of incidents and emergencies that could affect health or patient care.

These could be anything from extreme weather conditions to an outbreak of an infectious disease or a major transport accident. The Civil Contingencies Act (2004) requires NHS organisations, and providers of NHS-funded care, to show that they can deal with such incidents while maintaining services.

This programme of work is referred to in the health community as emergency preparedness, resilience and response (EPRR). New arrangements for local health EPRR form some of the changes the Health and Social Care Act 2012 is making to the health system in England.

Stockport’s Emergency Preparedness

Stockport CCG has achieved substantial compliance with the EPRR standards, as have commissioned NHS providers. The Stockport Health Economy Resilience Group (HERG) had oversight of the self-assessment process and subsequent submission to the Greater Manchester Local Health Resilience Partnership (GMLHRP).

Greater Manchester as an economy achieved substantial compliance with the EPRR standards.

The full report to GM LHRP on EPRR Annual Assurance Process for 2018-19 can be viewed here:

The 2018-19 EPRR Core Standards- Stockport Health Economy Compliance document, which can be viewed here:

Anita Rolfe, Executive Nurse, is the Stockport CCG’s lead officer for EPRR.

The NHS England Core Standards for EPRR are the minimum requirements that commissioners and providers of NHS funded services must meet in relation to their duties under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, their duties under the NHS Act 2006 as amended by the Health and Social Care Act 2012 and the expectations set out in the NHS EPRR Framework 2015.

The Core Standards are the basis of the EPRR annual assurance process and NHS commissioners and providers must undertake self-assessment against these standards in order to determine their overall EPRR assurance rating. The applicability of each Core Standard is dependent upon the organisation’s function and statutory requirements. Consequently, each organisation type has a different number of Core Standards to assure itself against.

For the 2018-19 assurance process, the number of standards by organisation type was as follows:

• Clinical Commissioning Groups: 43 standards
• Acute trusts: 64 standards
• Specialist trusts: 55 standards
• Community trusts: 54 standards
• Mental health trusts: 54 standards

Organisations providing a combination of services were expected to assess against the type with the higher number of standards.