The whole subject of clinical risk assessment is a complex one.
Which clinical risk assessment tool do I use?
Who can carry out a clinical risk assessment?
What training do I need?
All very valid questions, however good clinical risk assessment starts with good observation, good recording of that information and swift reporting. This before any clinical risk assessment tool is used!
A member of staff has to observe a person is not looking well, that member of staff doesn’t need to know about risk assessment tools, they just have to be able to spot when that person isn’t looking well, record and report what they see.
From that information a clinical risk assessment can be done, the tools could be a thermometer, a pulse oximeter, a BP machine and a chart. The information then aids a diagnosis and treatment.
Without the initial observation, the clinical assessment would not occur.
It is the same for mental health, social wellbeing and physical wellbeing!
So who is involved in clinical risk assessment? Everybody. Each having different potentially different roles.
What do they need to know? The service users and an intuition for knowing when something is wrong.
Intuition is an important skill, developed through experience and knowledge, and an essential part of clinical risk assessment.
Individuals need to begin to trust their intuition more and have their intuition listened too more. I know, intuition alone isn’t any good, which is whey it needs to be linked to recording and reporting.
It would be an interesting piece of empirical research to ask how many lives have been saved by that one person saying to themselves “Mmmmm! I’ll just go and check”.