Nelson Labs Coronavirus Continuity Plan
As a global leader in Safeguarding Global Health®, Nelson Labs’ top priority remains the health and wellbeing of our customers, their patients, and our employees worldwide. On January 30, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global emergency. With that declaration, potential supply chain disruption in the medical industry became a risk that we all must manage.
Although no business continuity plan can provide assurance of the removal of all risk, at Nelson Labs we are committed to maintain strong processes and controls to minimize the risk of a significant disruption to business operations related to COVID-19. Our continuity plan includes ensuring the safety and wellness of our staff, maintaining a consistent supply of essential testing components, and consistent communication with our customers.
Key Elements for Continuity
We have taken the following steps to ensure the safety and wellness of our staff, to ensure continuous service and availability for our customers:
- Minimized outbound staff travel with restrictions on high-risk areas.
- Off-site quarantine of individuals who are ill or test positive for infectious diseases.
- Increased facility sanitization and employee handwashing to ensure cleanliness and minimize infection spread.
- Screening of all visitors (for symptoms and recent travel) to minimize the risk of infection spread at our facilities.
- Ongoing proactive communication with our staff and customers to ensure best practices and ongoing awareness.
We are implementing the following steps to ensure supply consistency to minimize the risk of testing disruptions or delays:
- Maintain inventories of essential testing components to protect against disruptions.
- Proactively communicate and collaborate with our suppliers to ensure essential test components are available and shortages are minimized.
- Avoid single sourcing of vital supplies.
- Work across our global network of facilities (12 laboratory locations worldwide) to distribute supplies based on our customers’ needs.
- Utilize our global network of facilities to distribute testing to the laboratory location that can best meet our customers’ needs.
We will continue to take the following steps to ensure consistent, ongoing communication with our customers about their testing status:
- Updates via email and our customer portal of any outages, delays, or disruptions at any of our 12 global laboratory locations worldwide.
- We will work with customers to relocate work to the lab in our network that can best meet their testing and turnaround-time needs.
- As always, we will provide consistent, reliable updates through our customer portal about the status of each test.
- We will continue to contact customers individually about any problems, changes, or deviations to their testing.
With these measures in place, and constantly being re-evaluated by our team, we are confident that we will be able to minimize the risks associated with this outbreak without negative impacts or disruptions for our customers.
Please know we value our partnership with you and are committed to working through this challenge as seamlessly as possible. It is our commitment to provide you with world-class service and support always.
Sincerely,
Jeffery R. Nelson, M.B.A. SM(NRCM)
President
Nelson Laboratories, LLC.