Risk is not always negative.
That is, according to NATA Senior Learning and Development Trainer, Alexander Walsh, who said positive outcomes can come with risk.
Alexander spoke about the topic at NATA’s Accreditation Matters 2024 conference, where he said that risk can provide opportunities for improvement.
“While risk tends to be looked at when something has gone wrong and trying to make sure it doesn’t happen again, we can look at it as an opportunity of what we can we do to prevent it from happening at all,” he said.
Alexander added that the opportunities typically arise from effectively managing the risks.
“It’s about what can we do in advance versus what has happened, and how can we make that better,” he said.
Managing risk from non-conformity
As for the way laboratories typically do risk management, Alexander said it is from a non-conformity perspective that consists of identify, assess, and then control or treat steps.
“They look at what happened before, take corrective action, and then reduce the possibility of recurrence,” he said. “Or they say, ‘this happened before so let’s do something different next time'”.
While these steps may come from a non-conformity perspective, Alexander said it is still risk management and can provide opportunities for improvement.
An opportunity to ask
Alexander also said that risk management is often done as a static action after the event, but said it is better to view it instead as a “dynamic process”.
“Ideally, it should be continually looked at before things go wrong,” he said. “It should look at what good things can happen, as opposed to just what bad things can go wrong.”
To better manage risks, Alexander recommends asking these types of questions about a situation:
– What could go wrong or right?
– How could it fail or succeed?
– What’s vulnerable to our organisation and what is going to stay the same?
– What is going to be able to withstand changes or mishaps in the system?
– How do we protect our value? I.e., our people, our processes, in-house IVDs, and so on.
View the full recording from Accreditation Matters 2024 for additional insights by Alexander into the topic.