Production of standard operating procedures

In this section we examine in detail the content and structure of SOP and suggest guidelines for their development and production.

We then turn to the process of producing SOP and present a five-step approach that, importantly, involves people for whom the SOP is being written.

Finally, we present four different formats for SOP and discuss the advantages and limitations associated with each.

From plans to SOP

As a result of completing the previous section, you should now have a clear understanding of the context of SOP within the emergency management process, the relationship of SOP to emergency plans and be aware of what they are, who needs them and who should write them.

As you will remember we determined that plans are strategic documents relating to a number of organisations whilst SOP are tactical documents related to single organisations.

We will now consider the way in which SOP are produced. We will examinetheir content, their format and some matrices and other ways in which we can present the information contained within them.

We look at SOP that are derived from plans prepared during the planning process and we will also address the preparation of SOP for emergency operations centres.

Activity 2.4 What do SOP look like? To assist you in the learning process, an example SOP entitled, Standard Operating Procedure: Flash flooding and river floods, is included in the readings for this topic. You should understand at this point that, whilst we will be recommending a particular format for the SOP that you will produce in your assignment, there is more than one way to achieve the aim of producing effective SOP. Read Reading 5: Standard operating procedure: Flash flooding and river floods. To demonstrate the range of SOP try and obtain from an organisation in your local area a set of SOP. These may be from an emergency service or they may be from an industry or any one of the other types of organisation mentioned in the previous section. Keep this and the example SOP handy whilst we proceed through the remainder of this subject.   Print this activity

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