Why does your company need an emergency plan? According to experts in occupational risk prevention, it is an essential requirement for the safety and well-being of employees. For this reason, it is very important to know its characteristics and how should be evacuation plan created.
What Is A Company Emergency Plan?
It is a document that includes the planning of a human team and the technical means necessary to reduce as much as possible the negative consequences or damage that an emergency situation may cause, both economically and in terms of personnel.
This plan includes all the necessary strategies to cope with a possible accident or any type of negative contingency with the minimum damage. In any case, it must be taken into account that for its application it is necessary for the company to have the necessary material and technical means to create an adequate infrastructure for emergencies. For this reason, it is one of the fundamental elements of a master’s degree in occupational risk prevention, with the necessary training to guarantee the well-being of a company’s workers.
The main objective of this plan is to ensure that each person who is part of a business has the necessary knowledge to know what to do in the event of a serious contingency, from a fire to pollutant leaks, including sudden illnesses.
It is important to point out that emergency plans are regulated by law and must be implemented when a company carries out its activity in habitual circumstances of risk. In addition, it is mandatory that all staff receive the necessary education and training to know how to act in the event of a problem.
The characteristics of this type of planning are:
- It must offer the necessary and simple answers so that a person knows how to react to a problem.
- It has to be flexible, to be able to adapt to changes that occur in the company.
- All workers must know its content in a mandatory manner.
- It is necessary that all kinds of drills are carried out periodically to ensure that people assume it correctly.
- It must be alive. In other words, it has to be updated whenever necessary to adapt to all the situations that a company suffers.
How To Create An Emergency Plan?
The creation of an emergency plan falls to personnel specialized in the prevention and evaluation of business risks, which may be part of the same company or be integrated into an external organization. These experts in occupational health and safety will work together with the workers to draw up the corresponding plan, since they are the ones who know best both the facilities and the specific risks that their job entails.
The first step in carrying out a plan of this type is the identification of risks, since its content will depend on the specific characteristics of each work center and workforce. Therefore, the specific measures will be adopted depending on the specific rates of each company.
In this way, you must take into account that occupational risks can be associated with the health of workers and their severity. That is, the difficulty of controlling the emergency and the consequences those derive from it.
Regarding the strict implementation of a company’s emergency plan, we have already highlighted the need for all workers to know its content. Therefore, it will be essential to train them so that they have the proper training to react to a dangerous situation. With this objective, talks or informative sessions will be held and personalized intervention sheets will be carried out. In addition, the company must establish a specific emergency training plan, which will be updated periodically to ensure that it can respond to all changes in the company.
Similarly, it is essential that a plan to deal with possible risks in a company also has an annual plan for drills and evacuations. These tests must be carried out at least once a year and have the participation of all workers. Likewise, a subsequent evaluation will have to be made to ensure that the different concepts have been correctly assumed. In addition, they also serve to verify that the emergency plan is working correctly, in addition to the training achieved by the workers to deal with this situation correctly.
Finally, when applying a plan so that a company can deal with an emergency effectively, it is also necessary to take into account the need for maintenance and inspection of all facilities. In this way, you will have all the guarantees to reduce the risks of incidents. This review must be applied both to facilities that are likely to have an incident and those dedicated to the protection and prevention of contingencies, such as fires. In any case, the maintenance conditions established by law will always be followed.
Need for Customization
One of the most important aspects of carrying out an emergency plan is that its design must respond to the specific characteristics and risks offered by the work activity of a specific company.
What does this mean? Essentially, that the plan made for your company cannot be exactly the same as that of another. Occupational safety and prevention experts must be clear about the need to set up a specific and completely customized strategy for each business. This must be based on the basic elements of this type of plan, but always adapting specifically to each business.
In short, a company emergency plan focuses on knowing the specific risks of each company and training employees so that they know how to apply them appropriately in each case. In this way, they will know how to react correctly in each situation.
Do you want to know more about the design and application of an emergency plan for your company? Do not hesitate to contact us so that we can provide you with the necessary training.
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