MAJOR INCIDENT PLAN - NHS Cumbria

5. NHS EMERGENCY PLANNING GUIDANCE (2005)OVERVIEW5.1 The NHS Emergency Planning Guidance (2005) was produced in response to the Act(CCA). The Guidance is a set of general principles to guide NHS organisations in developingtheir ability to:a. Respond to major incident(s), andb. Manage their recovery from a major incident(s)Whether the incident(s) has effects locally, regionally or nationally.NHS DEFINITION OF A MAJOR INCIDENT5.2 According to NHS Emergency Planning Guidance 2005 a major incident, as it wouldaffect the NHS, is defined as“any occurrence which representsa. a serious threat to the health of the communityb. disruption to the service, orc. causes (or is likely to cause) such numbers of types of casualties as to require specialarrangements to be implemented by hospitals, ambulance trusts or Primary CareTrusts”5.3 For the NHS, “Major Incident” is the term in general use. With the implementation ofthe Civil Contingencies Act 2004 the term “emergency” may be used by some respondersinstead of “incident”. However, the NHS will continue to use the term Major Incident so as toavoid confusion with other elements of the services it provides.5.4 A major incident is any event whose impact cannot be handled within routine servicearrangements. It requires the implementation of special procedures by one of the emergencyservices, the NHS, or a Local Authority to respond to it for:• The rescue and transportation of a large number of casualties;• The involvement directly or indirectly of large numbers of people;• The handling of a large number of enquiries likely to be generated both from the publicand the news media, usually to the police;• Any incident that requires the large scale combined resources of the emergencyservices;• The mobilisation and organisation of the emergency services and supportingorganisations5.5 Each individual NHS organisation must plan to handle incidents in which its ownfacilities, or neighbouring ones, may be overwhelmed. The organisation itself may beNHS CUMBRIAMAJOR INCIDENT PLAN – FRAMEWORK FOR RESPONDING TO A MAJOR INCIDENTPAGE 15 OF 46Version 3 (Dec 2008)