Creating a team comprised of leadership and technical resources and ensuring that everyone has a clearly-defined role in response to a disaster is vital to maintaining operations. From database administration to internal communications, your organization should have a plan to utilize all necessary resources in the event of a disaster.
Teams within research centers can be extremely specialized and representatives from each of these teams should have input into your plan to ensure that all needs are met across your institution. For example, your regulatory staff should provide input on how to best document FDA-regulated studies and communicate with regulatory authorities. Research staff should document a method to reach study participants in the event of a disaster and maintain study visits, if possible. Operational leadership should maintain partnerships with similar institutions to use as study site backups. These are just a few examples of ways that input from each team can greatly affect your level of preparedness. Your teams should think about what tasks they perform day in and day out, how those could be affected by a disaster and what backups can be put in place.
