It is important that in the event of an incident that causes the complete or partial loss of buildings, including local IT, communications, documentation and other contents of a trial that business continuity can be maintained. Therefore a plan should be set out to act as a guide for key individuals to effectively recover key services to maintain the integrity of the trial. The plan needs to be sufficiently flexible so that when the nature of the crisis is known the plan can be reviewed and appropriate actions taken to respond to the incident faced. The plan needs to accommodate incidents at a lesser level such as loss of power, loss of phone services to more serious incidents such as extreme weather conditions or fire.
The key areas that need to be addressed for the continuity of
a
trial are the availability of the intervention such as medicinal
products and the randomisation services.