Business continuity plan, Hollin Cross Pharmacy
Business continuity plan template with recovery times
A business continuity plan has to say which work must keep going in a disruption, how fast each piece must come back, and exactly who does what in the first hour. This nine page plan for a community pharmacy does that with nine critical functions ranked by recovery time, six disruption scenarios, numbered recovery steps, a contacts table and a testing log.
The document, page by page
Every page as it renders and as it prints, with nothing summarised. Read the wording before you reuse it.
Section by section
What each section is for, so you can keep the ones you need and drop the rest.
- Cover
- Panel cover with the pharmacy, the plan and its review date.
- 1. Purpose and scope
- What is covered, why hours matter, and six triggers that activate the plan.
- 2. Continuity team
- Five roles, each with a lead, a deputy and responsibilities.
- 3. Critical functions
- Nine functions with maximum outage, recovery time and minimum resources.
- 4 and 5. Scenarios and the first hour
- Six scenarios with first response, and a four step first hour timeline.
- 6. Recovery steps
- Numbered steps for each of the six scenarios.
- 7 to 9. Contacts, resources and testing
- Outside contacts, backups and kit, a test schedule and the test log.
How to adapt this document
First, list your own critical functions by asking what would hurt a customer or the business first if it stopped, and set each recovery time from that harm rather than from what feels achievable. Second, keep the scenarios to the five or six that really threaten you; a cafe would swap cold chain and pharmacist cover for refrigeration and a chef. Third, name a deputy for every role and test the plan within a month of writing it, because the first test always finds a missing number or an empty grab bag.
What makes this document work
Recovery times come from patient harm
The critical functions table separates the maximum tolerable outage from the recovery time objective. Medicine fridges can last 2 hours closed, so they must be recovered within 30 minutes; urgent dispensing can wait 8 hours, so its target is 4. The ranking tells staff what to save first without a meeting.
The first hour needs no reading
Section 5 gives one pattern for every scenario: make safe in 15 minutes, assess, tell people, then start the scenario steps. Staff act on four lines before they open the detailed steps in section 6, which is how a plan survives a real power cut at 5 pm on a Friday.
Tests produce fixes, not ticks
The test log records what went wrong as well as the result: two ice packs not conditioned, label stock too low for an hour of manual dispensing, no spare data logger at the partner site. Each finding changed the plan, and every test has a last done and next due date.
Questions people ask
What is the difference between RTO and maximum tolerable outage?
The maximum tolerable outage is how long a function can be down before the harm becomes unacceptable or the business cannot recover. The recovery time objective is the earlier target by which it must be running again, even in reduced form. Setting the target well inside the limit leaves room for things to go wrong during recovery.
Is a business continuity plan the same as a disaster recovery plan?
No. A continuity plan keeps the whole business serving its customers during a disruption, using workarounds such as paper records and a partner site. A disaster recovery plan restores IT systems and data. Most businesses need both, and the continuity plan usually calls the recovery plan when systems fail, as this pharmacy plan does for its dispensing system.
How many scenarios should a continuity plan cover?
Enough to cover the ways you can lose people, premises, systems, power and suppliers, which often comes to five to eight. Writing one plan per possible event becomes unreadable. This plan uses six scenarios and a common first hour, so an unexpected event can still be handled by choosing the closest scenario.
Where should the business continuity plan be kept?
Somewhere that survives the disruption it is for. A plan stored only on the server that has failed, or in the building that has flooded, is no use. Keep printed copies in a grab bag and off site, and a digital copy in cloud storage the team can reach from a phone. The footer of this plan reminds staff of that.
How often should a continuity plan be tested?
Test the parts that change most often more often. Contact numbers and backup restores are worth checking every quarter or half year; a full walk through of a major scenario once a year is common. Test after any big change too, such as new premises or a new system, and record what failed and how it was fixed.
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