Carrying out a risk assessment in a dental practice

Risk is defined as the potential that a chosen action or activity (including the choice of inaction) will lead to a loss (an undesirable outcome). Or, in simple terms, the problem you don't know you've got… yet.

Management is the act of getting people together to accomplish desired goals and objectives using available resources efficiently and effectively.

So with risk management, we're talking about getting the team together and gathering resources to minimise the chances of there being an adverse incident or outcome in our place of work and, having learned from this, prevent a recurrence.

In CQC parlance, adverse incidents are any occurrence which actually didn't turn out as expected. For example, one member of the team turns up late regularly, or the lab sometimes return lab work a bit late. We're not talking nuclear accidents here.