Audit & Review

Audit & Review

---

OCTO provides extensive reviews and reports back in detail on emergency arrangements across a spectrum of businesses and organisations in a variety of sectors.  It often provides an insight to senior executives or crisis professionals in the business of their own arrangements from an external and trained perspective.  It can be wide ranging, top-to-bottom or focussed on specific areas.  It will always be honest, comprehensive and a basis for forward planning.

EMPIRE

EMPIRE stands for "Emergency Management Performance Indicators and Risk Evaluation" and is a benchmarking model of major hazard emergency management developed by OCTO and Cranfield University.  The package overall will enable you to establish with confidence the organisation and management regime you need.  It will also help ensure that your business is prepared to do everything reasonably practicable to protect life on and off site, the environment and your plant in the event of an emergency.  The model can be used in 3 discrete and complementary ways;

• To assess emergency management arrangements against the perspective of the site risks;
• To benchmark emergency preparedness on site against other major hazard sites; and
• To diagnose where best to target resources for maximum improvement in emergency response capability.

The EMPIRE model is essentially a database of emergency preparedness and management good practice.  It uses a balanced scorecard to assess 82 indicators of emergency preparedness across 6 different emergency management perspectives and 2 exercise assessment perspectives:

• Emergency policy / philosophy
• Emergency management structure
• Emergency organisation
• Emergency facilities
• Emergency plans
• Team preparedness

and

• Qualitative assessment of performance in exercises
• Quantitative assessment of performance in exercises

The aggregate score is termed emergency management capability.  The detailed assessment of the above include topics such as emergency procedures, muster, shelter, evacuation and roll call, on site fire-fighting strategy, mandates for decision-making, layout of emergency control centre, communications and information management, team structure, selection of personnel for emergency duties, training, competence and testing of plans.

The audit takes place in 3 stages:

• An on site visit and interviews with key personnel
• Witnessing a challenging site emergency exercise and its associated reviews
• Audit results are processed and a detailed report prepared

 

For more detail about audit and review of your emergency arrangements or the EMPIRE model please Contact Us at any time.

 

 

​

---

---

---