Minimising clinical risk

Many clinical interventions carry the risk of unexpected or unwanted outcomes, and the cost of dealing with these is a significant burden on healthcare resources. Paediatric cases have their own specific problems, related to issues like physiological immaturity and patient size, and complex family dynamics with third parties like guardians or parents. Risk management is the systematic process of identifying, evaluating and addressing potential and actual risk, and building up an organisational culture of being pro-active towards safety. Techniques such as risk analysis and significant event audits can be used to develop strategies. Risk management brings benefits in reducing adverse clinical outcomes and litigation. In the past, the National Health Service (NHS) has sadly failed to learn from its errors, but in the future it will develop methods to document and record adverse events, which although confidential, are unlikely to be anonymous.