Risk, Safety and Clinical Practice. Health care through the lens of risk

Risk thinking is transforming the understanding, organization, and management of health care systems. Its impact is likely to increase still further over the next two decades as technological advances, such as the new genetics and the discovery of new biomedical markers open up new possibilities for health risk management. Heightened societal risk consciousness, such as food panics, the alarm over flu pandemics, and the debate over the MMR vaccine, co-exists, apparently paradoxically, with increased life expectancy in developed societies.
At the same time, social trends are pushing health care systems towards the surveillance of populations and the targeting of groups identified as being at higher risk. All too often, service users, health professionals, policy makers, and researchers draw upon risk management frameworks without reflecting critically on their assumptions or limitations. This text introduces the reader to a range of issues, often unrecognized, which underline all health risk management.
Aimed at health professionals, managers, educators, policy makers, and researchers who are concerned with health risks, it helps the reader to analyse risk management issues, and to critically evaluate the claims made about existing and new organized responses to identified risks, in an informed and critical way. The topics covered in the book are illustrated through clinical examples which demonstrate their relevance for practice.
Risk, Safety, and Clinical Practice explores multiple stakeholder risk perspectives, particularly those of service users and carers, practitioners, the wider public, and policy makers.