Risk Management

Risk management is about improving patient safety by identifying and reducing risks which may cause harm or injury to patients.

We all know that things can go wrong and accidents happen in hospitals but it is important that we try to reduce these as much as possible.

Incident Reporting

An important part of risk management is identifying risks through ‘incident-reporting’. 

This includes times when something happened that could or did cause harm (an incident) and times when something could have happened to cause harm but didn’t (near miss). The Rotunda Hospital encourages all staff to report incidents and near misses in order to improve patient safety. This helps us to identify things that we can change and improve.

Incident Investigation

• If a mistake or incident happens to you, we will let you know as quickly as possible and we will explain what happened.
• If any treatment or care is needed, you will receive it straight away.
• If the incident is serious we will do a thorough investigation to see what went wrong and why, and what we can do to prevent it happening again.
• We will let you know that we are investigating the incident and discuss it with you.
• A team of people will be involved in reviewing the incident, which includes reading all the notes in the healthcare record, talking to the staff involved etc.
• It can take a few months to complete a detailed review of an incident but we will let you know when the review is likely to be finished.
• We will ask you if you would like to attend a meeting to discuss the findings of the investigation and offer you a copy of the report.
• Sometimes, we may not be allowed to share a report with you until later (for example if a coroner is investigating a death).

Other Ways of Improving Patient Safety

• The staff in the clinical risk management department meet with staff in all the wards and departments on a regular basis to discuss patient safety issues.
• Staff in each department identify risks in their own area.
• These risks are discussed at the patient safety meetings and a plan is put in place to reduce the risk. The hospital management team is informed of any serious risks.