Wednesday 27th April 2016
5 Top Tips for Preparing and Managing Incidents on Campus
Campuses, whether they be a College, University or International School, are often likened to small cities in terms of geographical spread, population and the wide range of facilities in operation. Managing this diverse environment whilst ensuring business continuity and student safety brings with it, many challenges. Incidents can and do occur all year round whether it be a broken window, slip, trip or fall or something more serious like a fire, bomb scare or even a student incident.
Talking to many Universities and International Schools we often ask:
- How prepared are you to handle the incidents that occur?
- Are the systems in place to help or hinder reaching a resolution?
- How do the systems you have in place ensure they support your student safety programs?
More often than not the feedback we get is that procedures are not always as helpful as they could be and improvements can be made to make incident management easier.
Here are our Top 5 Tips to prepare and manage incidents on campuses to ensure a fast resolution and support business continuity and student safety:
- MOBILE ACCESS TO INFORMATION – Store all your campus plans, contacts, drawings and procedures in one central location and ensure they are accessible from a remote location if systems are down or relevant team members are off site. This will enable the incident team to manage and resolve the incident in the quickest possible time whilst preventing it escalating.
- COMMUNICATION – Don’t underestimate the power of sharing live information across Business Continuity Teams / Incident Management Teams during an incident. Keeping teams up to date in real – time and communicating information out to remote locations can also help with escalation and a faster resolution. Utilising the leading mobile technology is pivotal when looking after the safety of students.
- ENHANCED INCIDENT RECORDING – Ensure your incident log is captured in an efficient way for post incident reporting and learning. Pre-determined action cards improve incident response consistency relative to the incident type. Workflows ensure a procedure is followed accurately and promptly, whilst a time and date stamp functionality can help map out the steps taken post incident.
- MULTIPLE INCIDENT RESPONSE – It never rains then it pours, have plans in place to manage multiple incidents across multiple sites / buildings at the same time. A central location for all incident information provides a single source for all incident / crisis management.
- REPORTING – By using an automated reporting tool all of the incident data can be collated into a single report – perfect for audits, monitoring trends or follow-up activity and process improvements.
If you are interested in finding out how ICR can help you prepare and manage incidents more efficiently on your campus, whilst minimising downtime and ultimately cutting costs, whilst upholding student safety – contact us today.