Risk Assessment

1
Risk Assessment Management The Role of
Evidence, Politics and Practice

• Steve Morgan
• Practice Based Evidence
• www.practicebasedevidence.com

2
What Use is the Evidence Base?

• Research interests too politically motivated
• Evidence base is too narrow to reflect realities
  in practice
• Hard v. Soft evidence
• Actuarial /or Clinical Judgement
• A preoccupation with numbers

3
The Politics of Fear

• Operating within a blame culture
• Media reporting and public interest
• Extreme events distort reality
• Not completing the risk assessment may have
  become the greatest risk for many practitioners
  
• Risk assessment becomes a discriminatory practice

4
The Politics of Practice

• Who are we really serving?
• What about service user choice, involvement,
  responsibility and decision-making
• Does legislation provide conflict or clarity?
• A focus on paperwork turns practitioners into
  administrators

5
Supporting Good Practice

• Department of Health Best Practice in Risk
  Management
• Supporting a structured clinical judgement
  approach
• NIMHE New Ways of Working dispersed
  responsibility
• A place for positive risk-taking
• What role does gut reaction/intuition play?

6
Main Messages

• The evidence base that we have is robust but, it
  is also too narrow and lacks accessibility to all
• Practitioners (of all professions) take risks in
  every decision we need to develop an evidence
  base narrative for why how
• Practice is an equation only partly based on the
  research evidence