What is Clinical Risk Management?
Clinical Risk Management (CRM) is an approach to improving the quality and safe delivery of health care by: • Placing special emphasis on identifying circumstances that put patients at risk of harm, and • Acting to prevent or control those risks. The CRM program at RCH aims to identify clinical ‘near misses,’ incidents, adverse and sentinel events through the incident reporting and the adverse event screening of medical records of patients who have died or had a an unplanned transfer to the Intensive Care Unit. Such events are monitored and analyzed with the focus to examine the systems in which the event occurred to redesign processes or develop improvement strategies for reducing or removing the potential for a similar event in the future. The work of the CRM Team is conducted in a ‘confidential’ manner. The reporting, monitoring, analyzing of incidents is best fostered within a ‘just’ culture. There is very good evidence that blaming individuals for adverse events does little to imp
