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CONCLUSIONS & RECOMMENDATIONS
A. Background
The FMD Contingency Plan must be the means by which personnel, processes and systems are effectively engaged to enable the proactive or reactive control and management of FMD.
The CP must be scalable in terms of managing the consequences to Scotland of an outbreak of the disease outwith Scotland or the UK as well as an outbreak within Scotland or GB. The plan must also scale across the continuum of possible outbreak scenarios (localised or generalised) and be sustainable to an outbreak persisting for some considerable time. In all scenarios, the plan should fully integrate, co-ordinate and de-conflict the roles, responsibilities, expectations, triggers and thresholds of a wide variety of stakeholders within Scotland, GB and beyond.
It is only if a plan has the capacity to support the taking of the highest quality of decisions that it can be said to be fit-for-purpose. As currently presented, the CP does meet the fundamental principles required of a national plan for the strategic management of all aspects of a disease outbreak.
B. Conclusions and Major Recommendations
C1 The CP is not an effective national plan for managing all aspects of an FMD outbreak
R1 The CP should be rewritten as a national plan for the strategic management of FMD outbreaks
R2 The CP should be based on agreed Strategic Priorities and Planning Assumptions
R3 The CP should regard an outbreak of FMD as a crisis and focus the national response around Scotland's crisis machinery
R4 The refined CP should be co-operatively designed and robustly tested with all disease control and wider impact stakeholders
R5 The CP should incorporate work undertaken following acceptance of recommendations from previous FMD inquiries, reviews and consultations
R6 The CP should be benchmarked against the requirements of international and domestic legislation amongst other drivers.
C2 The CP does not adequately support disease control decisions in the context of wider considerations of impact, cost and benefit
R7 Future versions of the CP must support decision-making that simultaneously considers disease control options against wider impacts
C3 The CP is not a resource for specified users or target audiences
R8 Future versions of the CP are a resource for users and target audiences both within and outwith the Scottish Government.
C. A Model Process for Transforming the Contingency Plan
Whilst our Key Judgements and Conclusions are radical, ours is not a counsel of despair.
Analytic Red judges that drawing on the knowledge and experience demonstrated by those consulted as part of this project and incorporating some of the content of the current CP, a process could be swiftly implemented to transform the current CP into a workable and usable resource.
In consequence, we present (overleaf, Figure 3) a model process for how this could be achieved. This process is a combination of new activities and the re-brigading and refreshing of work already undertaken.
Figure 3: A Model Process for Transforming Scotland's Contingency Plan for FMD
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