ISO 7101:2023 opens Clause 8.2.2 with its purpose: in order to ensure continuation of its services. That phrase governs the eight obligations beneath it. They are not eight ways to respond to an emergency. They are eight ways a healthcare organization keeps delivering care when something it depends on has failed.
This is what separates a hospital contingency procedure from an industrial emergency plan. An industrial site can stop production and evacuate. A hospital has ventilated patients, operating rooms in use, and a dialysis unit mid-treatment. Stopping is itself a clinical risk, and most of the people in the building cannot leave unaided.
This is a complete Clause 8.2.2 procedure discharging all eight obligations, plus the information system continuity requirement at Clause 7.5.4 f). Thirty-six pages, editable Word format, with a worked fictional hospital throughout.
Clause 7.5.4 f) requires the information management system to have contingency plans so that services are not disrupted. It is a named requirement, and in most organizations it lives nowhere. It is not in the emergency plan, because that plan is about the building. It is not in the IT policy, because that policy is about backups and recovery time rather than about how a nurse gives the right medication to the right patient with no record system.
Section 6.13 closes it with ten questions, including which clinical services stop entirely without the record, how allergies and current medication are known on paper, who declares downtime and recovery, and how a cyber incident differs from a technical outage — because the restore may reintroduce the problem and the outage may run days rather than hours.
The intersection nobody models. The ward list of who cannot move unaided normally lives in the electronic record — which is exactly what is unavailable in a fire, a flood, or a ransomware incident. Appendix B.4 makes it an offline ward-level record with a refresh interval. It is the single most valuable page in this procedure.
Clause 8.2.2 e) is the most prescriptive obligation in the standard’s contingency requirements. It names color coding of pipelines, pipeline material, connectors, leak detection systems and alarms, and requires adequate backup. This procedure covers each, with reserve capacity stated in hours at expected and at surge demand, zone valve locations known to clinical staff rather than only to facilities, and — the control that matters most — verification and certification before any pipeline is returned to clinical use after maintenance or building work.
Clause 8.2.2 d) requires backup arrangements for continuous and uninterrupted power supply, and Clause 8.2.1 h) requires the same for potable water. This procedure asks for the figures: generator run time at full load on the fuel held, the refueling trigger and supplier, what covers the gap between mains loss and generator start, water reserve in hours of service, and which clinical services fail first without water. It also asks the question most plans omit — what happens if the generator does not start.
Written to be read by the people who would use it. The front matter and the notes in this template are written at a plain reading level and checked against it. Clause language is kept where it is needed and nowhere else. A procedure that only the quality manager can read is a procedure that only the quality manager follows.
Quality directors, facilities leads and emergency preparedness coordinators at hospitals, clinics and other healthcare organizations certified to ISO 7101:2023 or working toward it. Particularly useful where emergency planning sits with facilities and clinical continuity sits with nursing and nobody owns the space between them, and where the information system contingency requirement has not yet been placed in any procedure.
New to ISO 7101? Our ISO 7101 overview course covers the structure of the standard and what it asks of a healthcare organization.
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A completed procedure. The decisions are already made and explained, with bracketed placeholders only where a value is genuinely yours to set — your test frequencies, your named roles, your retention periods. Every placeholder is a decision you must make, and the document says so. There are no blank records tables and no "TBD" entries.
Yes. It is supplied in editable Word format and licensed for internal use at any number of your own sites. Replace the fictional organization with your own, insert your own document number, and issue it as a controlled procedure. Resale, redistribution, or use in consulting deliverables for third parties requires a separate consultant license — contact us if that is what you need.
No, and no document can. A procedure is conformant when it reflects what your organization actually does and when the records it calls for exist. What this gives you is a structurally complete starting point, so the work is adapting decisions rather than inventing them from a blank page.
Most templates restate the clause. The standard says test the planned response; the template says "the planned response shall be tested." Nothing has been added. This one names the test types, states what each proves, requires findings to be recorded including what did not work, and explains why a test record with no findings is worth less than no record at all.
Microsoft Word (.docx), fully editable, with the header and footer document control blocks already built. Download is immediate on purchase.
Management Systems International, LLC is a veteran-owned and female-owned ISO consulting firm, co-founded in 1998. Across 28 years we have supported 80+ certifications, attended 200+ audits, and trained 600+ professionals. These templates encode what recurs across those audits — not one organization's approach generalized, but the structural patterns that show up again and again.
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