(PART 1 OF 4)
Following is the first part of transcripts from the first COS Roundtable on Emergency Preparedness, held on August 12 at the Centre for Health and Safety Innovation in Mississauga, Ont. COS editor Mari-Len De Guzman moderated the discussion.

Panelists:
John Hollands, corporate account manager, Ontario Service Safety Alliance
John Parish, chief, provincial fire sector, Municipal Health and Safety Association
Andrew Harkness, senior strategy advisor, healthy workplaces, IAPA
Ralph Dunham, board member, Canadian Centre for Emergency Preparedness
Doug Morton, director, life sciences and business management, CSA Standards
Jason Lakhan, Gowlings
John Saunders, provincial director, disaster management and international response, Canadian Red Cross – Ontario

Moderator: What are research and studies telling us in terms of the state of readiness of Canadian organizations to deal with an emergency situation?

Ralph Dunham: There is no specific definitive data that we can rely upon, there has been lots of surveys, but I think the real challenge in trying to determine how many or how pervasive it is within organizations is that preparedness is a lot like being healthy; how do you determine if you are healthy or if you are prepared. It’s a continuum – you continue to get more healthy, or you can be unhealthy, but it’s not that you can say, ‘Now I am prepared.’ So I think a lot of organizations, when they are asked the question, have difficulty in interpreting to what extent do they need to be prepared before they can state that they are prepared.
 
Doug Morton: From our perspective at CSA, we launched our emergency management and business continuity standard last October and organizations like the Canadian Centre for Emergency Preparedness, John (Saunders) as well were members of the committee that came up with that standard. And certainly in looking at marketing data, it’s quite clear from that data that in some cases it reports four out of 10 employees within organizations in Canada don’t know whether their companies have an emergency plan. And if they do have an emergency plan, don’t necessarily know what it is. So there does seem to be an issue. And certainly, in discussions that I have had across the country with a variety of organizations, they are at various stages of emergency preparedness. And so I think it is a significant issue that needs to be addressed.
 
John Saunders: With the development of the Z1600 Emergency Management Standard, I think that’s a good step. But there is even some confusion about what emergency management is. For many companies, it’s strictly, ‘Do I have a fire evacuation plan?’ It seems like fire and medical emergencies are covered off by larger companies. But looking beyond that, by way of doing overall risk assessments and recognizing that emergency management is so much larger than just fire and health. It’s really an entire, all-encompassing process that companies and businesses need to go through.
 
Moderator: Beyond the business continuity aspect of an emergency situation, is ensuring the health and safety of your workers. How involved are safety managers in the development of disaster preparedness strategies within an organization?
 
John Hollands: Traditionally, fire and emergency planning has fallen into the health and safety role, having your fire wardens trained, doing drills required by the fire code, first aid responders having those teams in place, having them trained – that’s traditionally been part of the health and safety manager’s role.
 
But integrating that into the business plans and into the organization plans as far as business continuity and high-level emergency planning, crisis management, that sort of thing, it’s fairly new. A lot of the larger organizations do it from a risk management point of view. They have more exposure than the smaller companies. And so I’ve seen, traditionally, they are the ones who seem to lead the field in those plans and developments, and having the crisis communication teams and that sort of thing in place. But the smaller businesses I think are just starting to realize that their business survival and continuity has some risks now, with many more emergencies that we’re looking at such as pandemic, etc.

Andrew Harkness:
I would suggest that our health and safety managers and practitioners, they have a balancing act. They are trying to ensure that the organization is in the prevention mode. Human nature is of the type that says, ‘I tend to respond more than I prepare.’ And we see that time and time again, whether it’s with pandemic – you had SARS – but to what level is the uptake to say how are we prepared for the next go around? We struggle with that.
 
So what I mean, from the health and safety practitioners’ point of view, is you have to elevate, in a way, a sense of urgency to the organization. But in a topic like this, you have to do it in such a way that doesn’t sound like you are in a fear mongering, “Peter-cry-wolf” mode. So I see that as a challenge to be able to say, you know we need to look at these issues. And unfortunately, in many of our organizations – to repeat the other point – is that our program for emergency preparedness is, ‘Yeah, we have a fire plan. And we’re really proud of ourselves if we could run a drill even twice a year.’
 
It’s unfortunately sometimes that level when we look at the standard for Z1600 here. It’s a managing of systems approach, and again, how does that come into the smaller firms to get a look at that and say, ‘How do I make it happen?’ But it is a challenge. How do we be proactive without sounding like we are always crying wolf?