How to Manage Risk in Healthcare Institutions?

By Roberta Broyles

A lot of hospitals are now engaging their employees into getting risk management certifications that they can then use to better manage risks in their hospitals. In order to understand the need for and the importance of such a certification in the healthcare industry you need to first understand what does risk management signify.

Risk management means firstly the understanding of risk. Next comes the prioritization of risk which is in turn followed by the efforts to reduce and control the probability of risk by applying all the possible resources at one's disposal. This technique helps mitigate risks and hence safeguards a business.

Studies have shown that hospitals had to pay nearly 1 million dollar in damages as a result of all the suits that arose due to negligent employees. Most health care organizations are under a risk because of the negligence of their employees.

According to the law the hospital needs to hire people after "due diligence". This means that they need to ensure that employees do not have a criminal background before they are hired. If you have someone on the staff with a risk management certification and someone who has the experience with such risks, then small mistakes like these can most definitely be avoided.

An employee with a risk management certification should be hired in health care institutions. This employee should be allowed to develop strategies for management of risk and also to help the rest of the employees in the companies understand the importance of managing risks.

A risk management certification teaches many different methods to assess and identify risks that a healthcare organization might face. Employees are trained to log in incidents that they believe may lead to greater risk. Next, these risks are analyzed at a higher level and worked against.

Observation is considered to be one o the methods of risk mitigation. In this method all the employees are asked to keep a note of all the instances during a normal day, which might expose the organization to greater risk. The risk mitigation team will then sit together to assess and understand these risks.

If an organization has employees who possess a risk management certification and who are well versed with the nuances of risk mitigation, then it can use the employees' skills to create an environment in the institution that mitigates risk to a huge extent. This is because these employees will help the organization to prepare a proper risk mitigation plan and implement it to mitigate risks. - 32544

About the Author:

Sign Up for our Free Newsletter

Enter email address here