A Balanced and Broadened Approach to Risk Assessment

Overview

Older adults living with complex health needs have a right to live with risk similar to all other individuals, yet when they interact with the health care system, clinicians tend to overprotect older adults when there are safety concerns and over focus on the potential negative and physical consequences.

Clinicians should instead be engaging older adults in a balanced, broadened and strength-based approach to risk assessment and management. This type of approach leverages older adults’ strengths and considers the negative and positive emotional, social and physical consequences of perceived risky decisions. Learning how to have a broaden and balanced approach to risk assessment has led to improvements in communication, clinical thinking, decision making and efficiencies in the care process and had decreased the moral distress that clinicians sometimes feel in these situations.

The Living with Risk: Decision Support Approach (LwR:DSA) is an approach to risk assessment that incorporates and operationalizes these elements and is especially useful when there is a difference of opinions about the care plan.

Presenter Biography

Heather MacLeod has spent her career supporting programs and systems to offer the best possible care and services to facilitate older adults and their care partners to age well; first as a clinician, then as a manager and most recently as a knowledge translation specialist. She is completing her Doctor of Science in Rehabilitation and Health Leadership with a focus in Implementation Science and is currently the Manager, Programs and Partnerships at the Provincial Geriatrics Leadership Ontario office. She started her journey into studying risk assessment back in 2010 from feeling dissatisfied with her conversations with both older adults and their caregivers.

Learning Objectives

In this live webinar, we will:

1. Apply the elements required for a balanced and broadened approach to your current approach to risk assessment;
2. Reflect how your values and beliefs impact your current approaches to risk assessment;
3. Evaluate how the four steps involved in the Living with Risk: Decision Support Approach could be integrated into your current practice.