Duty of care in practice, not only paper
Crisis preparedness, emergency response and duty of care for organisations working in fragile, high-risk and rapidly changing settings.
Why this is hard.
Duty of care is tested at the moment something happens: when a member of staff is detained, when an office has to close at short notice, when a national colleague cannot leave, when a crisis becomes public before leadership has been briefed. At that moment the question is not whether a policy exists. It is whether someone knows who to call, whether that person has authority to act, and whether the arrangements cover national staff, consultants and partners as well as international employees.
We work on preparedness as an operational system: defined roles, decision thresholds, communication routes, and arrangements tested before they are needed.
We also work on the parts organisations most often find missing: psychological support that is genuinely accessible, duty of care extended to partners and consultants, and continuity arrangements that assume the people who normally decide may be unavailable.
What we work on here.
- 01 organisational preparedness frameworks
- 02 crisis and critical incident response arrangements
- 03 duty of care policy and practice
- 04 staff safety, security and welfare
- 05 staff well-being
- 06 coverage for national staff, consultants and partners
- 07 psychological support and trauma-informed response
- 08 business continuity and operational resilience
- 09 evacuation, relocation and closure planning
- 10 communication and decision-making under pressure
- 11 preparedness for public and reputational crises
- 12 post-incident review and organisational learning
- 13 testing and exercising arrangements
How our services apply here.
This is a subject area, not a service. You commission one of the five below, applied to it.
| Service | Applied to Preparedness & Duty of Care |
|---|---|
| Research & Assessment | Preparedness assessment; review of duty of care coverage and gaps; post-incident review |
| Frameworks, Policy & Governance | Preparedness and crisis frameworks, duty of care policy, continuity arrangements, decision thresholds |
| Learning Design & Delivery | Preparation for staff and managers; crisis decision-making; trauma-informed management practice |
| Facilitation & Conflict Work | Scenario exercises and testing; post-incident reflection and repair |
| Advisory & Accompaniment | Advisory during and after a crisis; review and updating of arrangements |
Questions organisations bring us.
- "Our duty of care policy covers international staff. Most of our people are national staff."
- "We have a crisis plan. It has never been tested."
- "Something happened and we handled it badly. We want to understand why."
- "Who decides, at two in the morning, when the country director is unreachable?"
Selected work.
Connecting accountability, preparedness and duty of care
a preparedness framework for humanitarian and fragile settings, developed alongside an AAP framework and aligned with safeguarding and duty of care policies so that responsibilities, risk processes, reporting and preparedness actions operated as one coordinated system.
Talk to us about preparedness.
Tell us the issue, the decision or the change in front of you. We will tell you honestly which of the five services fits, whether you need more than one, and whether CTDC is the right organisation for it.
The first conversation is free and carries no obligation.
