The UAMS BCP Template contains the following sections:

• Department Information – Your department’s BCP manager, emergency contacts and alternates, contact information for additional staff and internal and external communication plans.
• Critical Operations – A prioritized list of essential and critical department operations.
• Readiness Checklist - A list of high-priority action items required to ensure that communication plans and critical operations continue during an emergency.
• Resources/Supplies – Essential resources and supplies needed to ensure critical operations continue, including supplier contact information.
• Services – A list of essential services the department requires to ensure critical operations continue, including provider contact information.
• Signatures – A record of review and approval by the department chair or director and notes about periodic reviews, when you will review, revise and update your BCP.

The UAMS BCP Template contains details, but primary activities are:

1. Name a department or division BCP manager and form a planning group.
2. Identify essential operations in our department or division.
3. Working with the BCP manager and planning group over a period of weeks, complete the BCP Template with as much detail as possible, consulting with the Emergency Management Department as needed throughout the process.
4. Send the completed draft to Emergency Management at EmerMgt@uams.edu, where it will undergo review. That feedback can be in written form, given in a meeting or both—your preference.
5. When the plan is finalized with help from Emergency Management, obtain approval and signoff from your department or division director.
6. Emergency Management can then conduct a final review and approval.

Just like UAMS's All Hazards Emergency Operations Plan, BCPs are living documents, intended to grow, change and improve over time.

Once a year, Emergency Management will arrange with the department or division to review and exercise your BCP, often in conjunction with related Building Emergency Preparedness Plans. Staff with roles in those plans participate in those exercises and go through Emergency Management training to prepare for exercises and actual incidents. Emergency Management tailors training and exercises to meet the needs of specific departments, divisions and buildings.

These exercises are designed to show a plan's strong points and opportunities for improvement. For related information, see Emergency Management Training Opportunities.

The institution-level All Hazards Emergency Operations Plan (AHP) describes how UAMS responds to incidents that impact normal operations. Its priorities are:

• Protect lives
• Stabilize the incident
• Minimize environmental and property damage
• Maintain essential campus operations

In contrast, BCPs establish priorities and procedures at the department level, which helps to restore UAMS’s overall operations when disruptions occur. Another level of emergency preparation occurs at the building level, in Building Emergency Preparedness Plans .

All UAMS departments and divisions are responsible for ensuring they have a BCP and that all employees are familiar with it.

Each department or division must appoint a business continuity manager who is ultimately responsible for all aspects of the BCP. This role should be filled by an upper-level staff member who can act as a project manager, communications facilitator and key contact for any issues with the plan.

Planning group works with the business continuity manager to create and maintain a BCP. This group should be comprised of employees who:

• Perform critical tasks and roles in the department or division’s critical operations
• Understand how the department or division operates at a detailed level

Just as UAMS has an All Hazards Emergency Operations Plan (AHP) to describe its responses to all types of emergencies at the institutional level, department and division BCPs plan responses at a lower level.

Together, these plans make UAMS stronger and better-prepared to carry out its missions and critical operations when disruptions or emergencies occur.

A department or division level BCP provides these benefits by:

• Addressing actions to take before, during and after a disruption of business functions occurs.
• Spelling out, in detail, the what, who, how and when of a recovery plan.
• Reducing liability and disruption to normal business operations while assisting leaders in their decision-making processes.
• Enabling your department or division to prepare for a broad range of events or disasters.
• Planning for the safety and security of UAMS employees, students, patients and property at a detailed level

Essential operations are businesses process that cannot be interrupted or become inaccessible without significantly jeopardizing UAMS's mission. For example, basic patient safety and care are essential operations that occur in many departments.

To identify essential operations, consider:

• Does the process support the department’s or UAMS's primary mission statement?
• Does it support essential business processes for one or more other departments?
• Can the process be back up and running quickly during or immediately after an incident?
• Does it have a high dollar value or business impact?
• Are political ramifications or implications involved?
• Are legal requirements or liabilities involved?

UAMS takes an all-hazards approach to business continuity planning. That's because most events—tornadoes, fires, deliberate human interference and so forth—affect our functions in similar ways, temporarily preventing the use of resources, such as:

• Space (classrooms, labs operating rooms, patient rooms for example)
• Infrastructure (power, water, sewer, networks, telephones)
• Employee
• Equipment (computers, medical devices, freezers and so forth)
• Focus your BCP planning on:
  • ­Identifying critical resources
  • ­Safeguarding those resources against loss (backup systems, restoring equipment, safe storage of research items, for example)
  • ­Actions that will reduce the impact of any losses
  • ­How to replace resources rapidly with vendors
  • ­Performing critical functions with the usual resources (paper-based processes instead of EMRs, for example)

The time varies according to each department or division and number and type of essential operations they perform.

Generally, BCPs should take about 1-2 months to develop. Most of the time goes toward developing priorities and action items, and experience shows that spending significantly more time doesn’t produce better plans.

Shorter, more focused timeframe seems to work best. BCPs also undergo annual reviews, and they are often revised and improved through testing, workshops and actual experiences.

You can assume in your BCP that UAMS, under its All Hazards Emergency Operations Plan, will:

• Manage access to buildings or portions of buildings if occupying them could be hazardous by posting signs and personnel. In worst-case scenarios, such as tornado damage, buildings could be closed for extended periods for inspection and repair.
• Locate temporary space so that department or division operations can resume or continue as normally as possible.

Another advantage of having a BCP on file is that it allows UAMS leadership to reallocate assets as needed to keep all essential operations functioning at the highest level possible during an emergency or incident. For example, if patients and staff must be relocated due to an outage, leaders can make better decisions by understanding the affected department's essential operations in its BCP.