RISK MANAGEMENT

Attended a talk on 'Risk Management' late last week. The speaker was the Head of Risk Management Dept of the hospital I'm currently serving with. To me, he's just another $50000-a-year fatcat who is draining the resource-depleted NHS. In another word, someone who is employed to do nothing so that no more monies are made available to better staff the medical and nursing departments.

He said most adverse incindents could be avoided if the risk-takers(ie doctors) could be a wee bit more careful. He went on to show us graphs after graphs of meaningless statistics. This was followed by an explanation of the incident reporting system and the way his department (staffed by more fatcats) deal with problems.

I must have dozed off half way through his talk, becoz I didn't seem to recall him mentioning anything about his ridiculous wages and the lack of doctors on the shopfloor.

I woke up just in time to hear a member of the audience asking him if the shortage of doctors in the hospital constitutes a risk, and what is his department going to do about it.

To this end, he answered: 'Well, my department only collates data. We then submit them to the Board. They are the one who make decisions about the hospital.'

I left the talk no wiser than when I first arrived. One can only wonder why the department wasn't called Risk Data Collation Department. In what exact way does it actually MANAGE risk??