Introduction

Welcome to this course on Risk Management and Assessment.

Risk Management is important to:

• support the safety of service or activity that you provide
• support you to identify, assess and manage risks in a systematic way
• to support in compliance with regulatory standards and professional guidance

Although these focus around regulatory compliance, this also makes business sense to ensure that you are being as efficient as possible with the resources you have by proactively managing issues before they occur. Good governance supports business aims and does not hinder it.

This course will cover the topic of Risk Management in a systematic way:

1. Hazard Identification
2. Assessment
3. Management

During all these steps we will focus on how to document. This is because you use this documentation to demonstrate your compliance. The documentation process also supports structured thinking which will help manage the identified risks.

Each step in this course is supported with a video, where I will explain in more detail the considerations you should have, and to support different learning styles. Each section has a brief quiz to help cement any new knowledge you pick up.

With a growing number of services offered in healthcare, there are various NHS service specifications that require a risk assessment to be carried out. Think about NHS vaccination services for example.

It's not just NHS services, private services like prescribing require a form of risk assessment to be carried out as part of the professional and regulatory guidance that is out there.

A failure to implement this guidance can be catastrophic, both in terms for individual patients but also for professional reputation and registration.

There are other courses offered on this platform specific to prescribing services or for pharmacy services which may support your further.

"But I risk assess and risk manage on a daily basis!"

A common objection that individuals have in relation to documenting their risk assessments is that they have a mental model or use their common sense to stop bad things from happening.

Often the actions we complete during routine processes, are the result of experience (a reactive change) or training (a type of risk mitigation) that we have been through. We know that it makes sense to have a clear work area before starting a piece of work, however we may have only come to know that because we mixed up and/or lost something important previously or because we had another experienced individual tell us.

An advantage of having a strategy means that this knowledge can be transferred to others more easily without having to had go through the pain of an incident occurring.

Other advantages of following a risk management strategy are:

1. It helps cover unfamiliar areas that we don't yet have experience in
2. It is systematic and repeatable which means it can be more easily defended if things go wrong
3. A good strategy implemented in a systematic way means that you end up being more thorough and effective
4. It helps you to formalise and document your activities, providing an audit trail.

Lesson Summary

Risk Management is crucial for supporting the safety of services or activities, identifying, assessing, and managing risks systematically, and ensuring compliance with regulatory standards and professional guidance. It is important to follow a structured approach for risk management.

The course is designed to cover the following topics:

• Hazard Identification
• Assessment
• Management