Get Ready Queensland Week 2025: Is your practice disaster-ready?
In South East Queensland, floods, storms, and fires can strike with little warning, disrupting essential health services when they’re needed most. As we mark Get Ready Queensland Week, Brisbane South PHN reminds primary healthcare professionals to make sure their services can continue operating and their teams stay safe in the event of a disaster.
Preparing now by reviewing your emergency and business continuity plans helps protect your patients and staff when severe weather hits. Read on for practical steps and simple actions your practice can take today to strengthen your disaster readiness responses.
Key resources to help you ‘Get Ready’
The Disaster Readiness Checklist is a step-by-step guide for practices that includes supply audits. Get the checklist and access to a suite of preparedness materials from the our website.
Resources for residential aged care professionals include:
Ageing Australia’s residential aged care checklist.
Tips for preparing your practice before a disaster
Review and practice your disaster plan quarterly. Remember to:
secure records digitally
train staff on telehealth backups
stay connected to important updates via your Council’s Disaster Dashboard.
Tips for preparing your patients before a disaster
Now is the best time to prepare patients and aged care residents.
You can remind your patients to:
update medication lists
identify emergency contacts
know power back-ups
organise care back-ups
learn evacuation routes.
For chronic illness patients, emphasise backup plans for insulin or dialysis. Patient-facing materials on health risks and self-care are freely available for download from RACGP.
People with chronic health conditions and disability will need to consider how they will manage their functional capabilities and support needs during an emergency. The P-CEP User Guide is designed for community health and disability providers to:
improve emergency preparedness for people with chronic health conditions and disability
reduce negative impacts for patients following natural disasters
improve patient recovery following natural disasters.
Tips for preparing your household
The Get Ready Queensland website provides links to create a household emergency plan, as well as instructions on how to stock an ‘emergency kit’ with medications, documents, and non-perishables for a minimum of 3 days.
Quick tips
1. Emergency alerts may arrive from this number: +61 444 444 444. Save it as a favourite.
2. Enter ‘13 19 40’ into your web browser to show traffic disruptions.
3. Access your local Council’s disaster dashboard and sign up to receive warnings.