Oil companies must make better plans to keep supplies moving out of Grangemouth in the event of a flu pandemic, it has emerged after an emergency planning exercise.
Schools also have to be better prepared to fill vacancies once teachers begin to go off work with illness.
There were also concerns about stockpiles of anti-viral drugs if such an outbreak took hold and spread rapidly.
The recommendations were included in a report on Operation Winter Willow, a test of pandemic emergency plans across government and emergency services that was carried out last January and February.
The report, published by the Scottish Executive as part of a UK-wide exercise, says more should be done to improve communications between different organisations. It found that daily video-conferencing between national level and health boards proved particularly useful.
The concerns around shortages of anti-viral drugs are being addressed with a review of current planning, and new priority groups are being identified, with an announcement at UK level by June next year.
The specific Scottish issues identified by Operation Winter Willow included fuel supplies, school closures, recovering planning for backlogs of routine work and the importance of keeping the Scottish Parliament operating. Holyrood officials have begun plans to make sure it is not forced to close by staff shortages.
"The exercise showed that maintaining business continuity will be a significant challenge to all organisations during a flu pandemic," said the report. "Specific business continuity issues identified included the consequences of staffing shortages at major fuel depots such as Grangemouth."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article