Risk Analysis

Risk analysis identifies areas that may hinder the organisational goals. This is done by sorting risks into likelihood (the chances of an incident occurring) versus consequences (the potential outcome to the organisation). Risks that can have severe detrimental outcomes to the organisation can involve one or many people, they can have a high or low possibility of occurrence and can be costly or quite cheap to rectify. Most companies feed this type of information into a risk analysis matrix, to see if fixing a ‘perceived risk’ is viable for the company.

In the Ambulance Service of New South Wales (ASNSW), this process is achieved through an Incident Information Management System (IIMS) which is a NSW Department of Health initiative, and according to Travalglia and Braithwatie (2006) has been designed to ‘disseminate lessons learned from an incident which has had a potentially negative consequence to the patient or the healthcare worker’ (p.24).