Guidance to the use of the ISO 22000 standard indicates that Top Management should ensure that the org. establishes and maintain procedures to identify potential for and respond to potential accidents, emergency situations and incidents.
The Org. is also expected to review and / or revise where necessary its preparedness and response procedures after the occurrence of an actual accident or emergency situation.
How far should we cover and in the case of BRC-Food where we address emergency incidents supported perhaps by contamination incident procedures, ISO 22000 appears to be very implicative particularly on potential situations such as bio-terrorism issues.
What are the programs, procedures and response models that we need to put in place under this requirement.
Hello Charles, this is an interesting area; let's take a look at some possible emergency situations:
Acts of God - such as fire, earthquake, tsunami, hurricane, flooding etc.
Accidents - such as fire, explosion, plane crashing on the plant etc.
Wilful Acts - such as bombs, toxic poisoning, terrorist threats and acts, giant three headed ‘factory eating' sea eel etc.
It is easy to become complacent and think
' that will never happen to us', but most of them (apart from maybe the sea eel) have happened and will happen again…and therefore it could be you.
You can prevent and minimise the opportunity for some emergencies to occur (mostly the ones committed by people) by having secure premises e.g. security guards, keypad entries, self closing doors, strict entry control procedures etc. You can also have in place sprinkler systems, fire drills and direct lines to emergency services such as the police, ambulance and fire service.
However some things are totally beyond our control.
The likelihood of a catastrophic emergency occurring is very low but the severity would be devastating and could completely end our ability to produce and supply goods. For the things we cannot prevent or control all we can do is consider what could happen very carefully and have systems and procedures in place for dealing with the immediate emergency and ensuring we get back to some sort of normality ASAP.
Procedures should cover what to do in the case of an emergency and who is responsible for what, you may have different levels of emergency and response depending on the severity, which would probably be based on the ability of the business to continue operating and supplying safe and legal products - these levels of emergency would be specified in the procedure.
Where possible you could endeavour to make mutual partnerships with competitors to ensure that you cover each others butts in an emergency and ensure some continuation of supply to customers. This is especially important to customers where you are currently the sole supplier. Obviously this is easier said than done because of things like tooling, raw materials etc. however, it should be explored. As well as protecting our customers supply line we should ensure that our suppliers are prepared for an emergency also.
People should be trained in what to do and when and just like Product Recall there should be an annual test of the emergency procedures, the results of which should be fed back into the loop to improve the emergency procedure.
As ISO 22000 is expected to be formally published soon, it is inevitable that we need to take view of this impending standard some what seriously and hold a good grip of it to keep. This is the only forum that I am aware of that has so far make a decent effort in keeping the public in touch with this standard.
It is Charles. I think so far it has been the ‘hawks' sorry consultants who have shown an early interest in the Standard and they are now busily preparing their portfolios. Once the Standard is published and users begin to visit the SDF for advice I'm sure the ISO 22000 forum will get busy again - and the hawks (and three headed eels) will no doubt return.
Cheers,
Simon