University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust (UHB) is a member of the West Midlands Local Resilience Forum (LRF) and we are proud to work together with partner agencies to ensure that if, and when, an emergency occurs, we are prepared to respond together and minimise any impact.
Every resilience forum has a Community Risk Register (CRR) which describes risks for the community and assesses how likely they are to lead to an emergency and the potential impact they would have. The register is created through a risk assessment and the information is used by the LRF to plan and prepare for emergencies that may occur.
The CRR focuses on serious risks that could result in an emergency, defined by the Civil Contingencies Act (2004) as:
- an event or situation which threatens serious damage to human welfare in a place in the UK
- an event or situation which threatens serious damage to the environment of a place in the UK
- war or terrorism which threatens serious damage to the security of the United Kingdom
The West Midlands CRR is available to download and puts the national risks in a local context and while it doesn’t describe all risks, it highlights those which could affect our routine day-to-day lives.
The potential for national emergencies is determined by Government in its National Risk Register.
West Midlands Local Resilience Forum
The West Midlands LRF is a partnership of member agencies, including those defined under the Civil Contingencies Act (CCA) 2004 by responder categories:
- Category 1 responders are organisations that are directly involved in the response to an emergency. These responders are subject to a number of civil protection obligations
- Category 2 responders are those who have a role to play in response but are less directly involved
The CCA does not place such stringent duties on these responders but does require that they share information appropriate to managing emergencies and cooperate fully with the LRF.
In the event of an incident, the partnership agencies that form the LRF join forces to:
- consider the hazards that feature in the West Midlands, assessing the impacts of the risk and providing this information to the public in a Community Risk Register
- create plans to help make the risks safer, setting out how we will come together to respond should an emergency happen and how we can help people get back to normal afterwards
- ensure our response is coordinated when things do go wrong
- carry out training and testing to make sure we are ready
- identify lessons from incidents and exercises, learning as we go along to improve how we respond in the future
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Last reviewed: 20 March 2024