2025 Agenda

Cybersecurity is more than just an IT concern—it disrupts clinical departments and patient care, requiring a coordinated, organization-wide response.

This session will explore strategies for rapid organizational activation during unexpected cyber events, ensuring a swift and effective response despite limited initial visibility.

Learn how to establish communication redundancies to maintain critical information flow and foster cross-departmental collaboration among IT, Operations, Legal, Communications, and Leadership teams.

Additionally, we’ll discuss how to integrate multiple cybersecurity frameworks into a cohesive strategy tailored to your organization’s unique needs. Join us to discover how breaking down silos and working together can strengthen your cybersecurity resilience.

Key Session Takeaways Include:

• Rapid Organizational Activation: Be prepared for a swift, unanticipated cyber event with little immediate visibility of its full impact.
• Communication Redundancies: Establish multiple communication channels to ensure leadership teams can disseminate critical information efficiently, even under adverse conditions.
• Cross-Departmental Collaboration: Foster seamless collaboration among IT/IS, Operations, Legal, Communications, and Leadership teams – cybersecurity requires breaking down silos and integrating everyone’s needs in early planning.
• Integrating Frameworks: Develop a cohesive strategy by tying together various cybersecurity frameworks to serve your organization’s unique requirements effectively.

Hospitals traditionally anchor their preparedness programs in emergency management, often focusing on responses to visible, public-facing incidents. While vital, this approach can miss a broader range of organizational disruptions that endanger the continuity of critical healthcare services. This session invites healthcare professionals to challenge the conventional approach and explore Business Continuity Management (BCM) as a more robust, proactive foundation for hospital preparedness.

Grounded in the DRI International Professional Practices for BCM, the session will reframe how hospitals perceive resilience—shifting the lens to view patients and families as customers, and benchmarking healthcare operations against industries like finance, which have long embraced continuity planning. Attendees will gain a clear understanding of the distinctions between emergency management and business continuity, and how the latter supports comprehensive organizational resilience by aligning with cybersecurity, communications, physical security, and disaster recovery.

Key Session Takeaways Include:

• Differentiate between emergency response planning and business continuity management in the context of healthcare.
• Discover how adopting BCM can enhance hospital resilience by integrating with key organizational domains such as cybersecurity, physical security, and communications.
• Apply actionable BCM strategies to embed continuity planning into daily operations and strategic decision-making.
• Learn how to align hospital preparedness with cross-industry best practices to safeguard critical services during disruptions.
• Explore a system-wide, proactive approach that ensures seamless continuity of care—even in the face of significant disruption.

For the past 25 years, the Canadian Armed Forces has maintained a high readiness capability to respond to occupational and environmental health threats, both internationally and domestically. This session explores how our military ensures the safety of our soldiers, sailors, and airmen and airwomen through a wide range of sampling strategies, and the unique challenges faced when planning missions into remote and austere locations.

Key Session Takeaways Include:

• How forward thinking and communication plans can assist with mission success; a hard lesson learned from the 1990s.
• The challenges posed to field work and how “The Rule of Three” is applied for sample collection.
• Beyond the basics of air, water, and soil sampling, what other value-added services can be provided to ensure the safety of personnel.
• Steps taken and information required to operationally plan for a mission that could be down the street, or on the other side of the planet.

Canada experiences thousands of earthquakes each year, with some posing significant risks to communities, infrastructure, and critical services like hospitals. 

This session will explore the nature of earthquakes in Canada, the associated hazards—including structural damage, tsunamis, landslides, and liquefaction—and the importance of preparedness.

A key focus will be on Canada’s new Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) and its potential benefit to healthcare facilities. Learn how hospitals and their staff can leverage early warnings to minimize injuries, reduce operational disruptions, and accelerate recovery efforts in the aftermath of seismic events. This session will provide essential insights into risk mitigation strategies and real-world applications of EEW in healthcare settings.

Key Session Takeaways Include:

• Earthquakes in Canada, their history and locations
• Associated Risks to communities and hospitals (damage, tsunami, landslide, liquefaction, etc.)
• Earthquake preparedness and what you need to know
• Canada’s new Earthquake Early Warning system and how it can be used by Hospitals and their staff to reduce injury, limit impacts, and facilitate return to normal

This session explores how healthcare systems can proactively integrate climate futures into emergency preparedness using the Futures Triangle, a strategic foresight tool. Participants will analyze the pushes of the present (current climate and healthcare trends), pulls of the future (emerging opportunities), and weights of history (systemic barriers) to develop more resilient and adaptive responses to climate-driven emergencies.

Key Takeaways Include:

• Strategic Foresight for Resilience – The Futures Triangle helps healthcare leaders and emergency planners anticipate climate-driven challenges and opportunities, fostering a proactive rather than reactive approach.
• Understanding Climate Futures in Healthcare – Climate change impacts healthcare systems through extreme weather events, shifting disease patterns, and infrastructure vulnerabilities, requiring long-term adaptation strategies.
• Balancing Present Pressures and Historical Barriers – Effective preparedness must account for pushes of the present (trends like resource constraints and policy changes) and weights of history (institutional inertia and systemic barriers).
• Hands-On Application for Practical Solutions – Applying the Futures Triangle to a real-world climate-related healthcare emergency helps participants think critically and develop actionable strategies for their own organizations.

The creation and launch of a standardized Emergency Planning and Management Program across Extendicare’s long-term care homes in Canada marked a significant step towards ensuring consistent and comprehensive emergency preparedness throughout all 118 long-term care facilities.

The process involved reviewing and updating existing manuals, aligning policies with integration goals, and ensuring compliance with provincial regulations in Ontario, Manitoba, and Alberta. Collaborative consultations with external emergency planners, internal leadership, and home staff were key to refining the program for practical use. Early engagement of regional leaders helped foster support and enthusiasm for the initiative.

The final program provides a comprehensive toolkit for local-level emergency planning, enhancing the ability of staff to respond effectively to incidents and ensuring resident safety.

Key Session Takeaways Include:

• Critical feedback from the homes during the launch and initial setup of their home emergency response plans:
• Explanation of why and how this templated, standardized approach relieved them of significant time and effort, allowing them to concentrate on providing quality care for residents.
• Next steps and initiatives to maintain momentum and develop new approaches.

How do we maintain emergency readiness when our digital infrastructure fails us? On July 18, 2024, an essential system update, CrowdStrike, triggered a global IT failure, bringing healthcare systems to a standstill.

As a frontline physician working during the outage and the Medical Director of Emergency Management for my health authority, this session will dissect the response, highlighting operational breakdowns and key takeaways for strengthening resilience in future cyber crises.

Key takeaways:

• IT system failures can cripple healthcare operations as much as natural disasters.
• Downtime preparedness must be as robust as any other emergency response plan.
• Regular Code Grey drills, predefined recovery protocols, and backup systems must be prioritized to ensure healthcare continuity when technology fails.

The presentation will focus on the critical role that a Board plays in ensuring effective emergency preparedness. As healthcare environments face increasingly complex events, Boards are challenged overseeing and guiding the development and implementation of robust emergency preparedness plans. Their leadership ensures that hospitals are well-equipped to respond efficiently and effectively in times of emergencies.

The presentation will emphasize the importance of governance, strategic planning, and collaboration between leadership and external emergency management partners. It will also highlight the board’s responsibility for risk management, resource allocation, policy oversight, and continuous improvement in emergency preparedness protocols.

Key Session Takeaways Include:

• Understand the Role of the Board in Emergency Preparedness
• Highlight Key Areas of Emergency Preparedness Oversight
• Identify Legal and Ethical Responsibilities
• Promote Effective Communication and Collaboration
• Evaluate the Role of the Board in Risk Management and Crisis Decision Making
• Explore the board’s role in ensuring that emergency preparedness plans are regularly reviewed, tested, and updated.

Healthcare Leaders are all too familiar with workplace violence against healthcare workers as a significant occupational health problem within Canada. Healthcare workers have the right to perform their jobs in a safe, healthy and violence-free workplace. This interactive session will allow participants to engage in scenario-based learning, explore the application of legislation, and how to apply lessons learned to your own hospital.

Key Session Takeaways Include:

• Engagement: Engage with peers in workplace violence scenarios and discuss key moments of emergency response.
• Exploration: Explore opportunities based on shared scenario learnings and applied legislation for future growth within your programs.

Hazard identification risk assessment (HIRA) assists by providing a tool that can be used to assess risk based on potential consequences and frequencies. The purpose of HIRA is to identify which disasters should be the focus of emergency management programs at a particular point in time.

Systematic risk assessments can shift the focus of programs from being solely reactive to being proactive. A proactive approach to emergency management can result in a more disaster-resilient Ontario.

Key Takeaways:

• Helps Organizations prepare for the worst and /or most likely risks.
• Allows for the creation of exercises, training programs, and plans based on the most likely scenarios.
• Saves time by isolating disasters that cannot occur in the designated area.
• It can help to reduce financial costs, which can then be redirected toward other emergency management projects.
• Helps your program to become proactive rather than solely reactive.