Support & operations · Planning worksheet

Healthcare recovery exercises: choose a realistic scenario

Illustrative situation

A recovery exercise assumes every administrator, system and instruction is available. It does not test the conditions likely to make an actual outage difficult.

The decision

Choose a bounded scenario based on a meaningful dependency failure and agreed objectives. Use an authorised exercise plan that avoids disrupting real services.

Rehearse this before accepting the change

Rehearse the loss of one key dependency while preserving the exercise's safety boundaries and record where the plan relies on unavailable resources.

Use fictional examples and an authorised test environment. Record what happened, the evidence you inspected and any issue that still needs a responsible owner.

Choose a useful measure

Measure objectives achieved and previously unknown recovery dependencies.

Agree the definition and baseline with the team doing the work. Review the result over a comparable period and note other changes that could affect it.

Healthcare website maintenance with infrastructure, a status panel, tools and an operational checklist.
Monitor the useful journey, not just whether a server responds.
Healthcare backup and recovery illustrated by storage copies, an archive folder and a restoration route.
Test whether a backup can restore a usable service.
Healthcare digital support handover with an inventory, key, incident timeline and dependency map.
Keep responsibilities and recovery instructions available.

Your planning worksheet

Use these checks to prepare a discussion with your team or supplier. Tick a check when you have recorded the decision or evidence, rather than when a feature has simply been promised.

Decisions to record

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Further reading

These primary sources provide additional context for the project decisions above.

Related decisions

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