Emergency Preparedness, Resilience and Response (EPRR)

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 services, 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).

The ICB is a Category 1 responder organisation, as defined in the Civil Contingencies Act (2004).

In April 2023, the ICBs have also taken over the facilitation of the Local Health Resilience Partnership (LHRP from NHS England. The role of the LHRP is to provide strategic leadership on EPRR for the health organisations and communities of the Local Resilience Forum (LRF) area (Lancashire and South Cumbia).

Local Resilience Forums (LRF) are partnerships of member agencies, including those defined under the Civil Contingencies Act (CCA) 2004 by responder 'categories':

  • Category 1 responders are organisations that are directly involved in the response to an emergency. These responders are subject to several civil protection obligations.
  • Category 2 responders are those who have a role to play in response but are less directly involved. The Act does not place such stringent duties on these responders but does require that they share information appropriate to managing emergencies and cooperate fully with the LRF.

Lancashire and South Cumbria Integrated Care Board is a member of both the Lancashire Resilience Forum and Cumbria Resilience Forum. We work together with partner agencies to ensure that if, and when, an emergency occurs, we are prepared to respond together and minimise any impact.

In the event of an incident, the partnership agencies that form the LRF join forces to:

  • Consider the hazards that feature in the LRF area, assessing the impacts of the risk and providing this information to the public in a Community Risk Register.
  • Create plans to help make the risks safer, setting out how we will come together to respond should an emergency happen, and how we can help people get back to normal afterwards.
  • Ensure our response is coordinated when things do go wrong.
  • Carry out training and testing to make sure we are ready.
  • Identify lessons from incidents and exercises, learning as we go along to improve how we respond in the future.

Every Local Resilience Forum has a Community Risk Register (CRR) which describes risks for the community and assesses how likely they are to lead to an emergency and the potential impact they would have. The register is created through a risk assessment, and the information is used by the LRF to plan and prepare for emergencies that may occur.

The CRR focuses on serious risks that could result in an emergency, defined as:

  • An event or situation which threatens serious damage to human welfare in a place in the United Kingdom.
  • An event or situation which threatens serious damage to the environment of a place in the United Kingdom.
  • War or terrorism which threatens serious damage to the security of the United Kingdom.

Source: Civil Contingencies Act (2004)

Lancashire LRF Community Risk Register can be found here

Cumbria LRF Community Risk Register can be found here

The potential for national emergencies is determined by Government in its National Risk Register

The annual NHSE Core Standards for EPRR review process is undertaken in line with the NHS EPRR framework.

The purpose of the NHS core standards for EPRR is to:

  • enable health agencies across the country to share a common approach to EPRR
  • allow co-ordination of EPRR activities according to the organisation’s size and scope
  • provide a consistent and cohesive framework for EPRR activities
  • inform the organisation’s annual EPRR work programme.

Our EPRR role is to:

  • Ensure contracts with provider organisations contain relevant emergency preparedness, resilience (including business continuity) and response elements
  • Support NHS England in discharging its EPRR functions and duties locally
  • Provide a route of escalation for the Local Health Resilience Partnership (LHRP) should a provider fail to maintain necessary EPRR capacity and capability
  • Fulfil the responsibilities as a Category one responder under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004
  • Maintain business continuity plans
  • Seek assurance provider organisations are delivering their contractual obligations.

We do this by:

  • Working with the LHRP to develop strategic multi-agency plans for responding to emergencies
  • Participating in training and exercises which are used to review multi-agency plans
  • Assisting with the local co-ordination of the response to emergencies in partnership with NHS England
  • Working with the LHRP to ensure the capacity, skills and competencies required are in place to co-ordinate the local health response to an emergency
  • Undertaking regular performance monitoring of NHS funded services
  • Co-operating with the multi-agency planning and response in accordance with the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 requirements
  • Ensuring a 24 hour a day, seven day a week on-call system
  • Ensuring compliance with the national core standards for EPRR for NHS funded healthcare providers
  • Maintaining business continuity plans to ensure service delivery is maintained. 
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