Step 3 – Practising and updating your plan

It is important to regularly review and update your Community Emergency Plan to ensure it meets the changing needs of your community. It is also important to make sure that your plan arrangements work in an emergency.

As a minimum, you should check regularly that it is still up to date. You may want to practise using the plan to test how well it would work in an emergency and see how ready members of your team and volunteers are to help out.

You could work with your local emergency responders, using the local risk assessment you have produced, to identify scenarios that you can use to test the arrangements you have made in your plan.

Your local emergency responders may be planning to practise their own emergency plans and, if so, you may be able to practise “activating” your plan as part of their exercise.

Practising the arrangements in your plan will allow you to identify any problems with it. Once you have practised your plan, you should review and update it. You should also regularly review and update your emergency contact list to ensure it is accurate.

When you make any changes to the plan, you should record them to make sure that everyone knows they are using the latest version and ensure that everyone who needs a copy of the plan is sent a copy of the updated version.