ABSTRACT
Risk management is an essential element of clinical governance. Clinical risk management is about what goes wrong during patient care and why, and is concerned with learning lessons from these incidents to ensure that action is taken to prevent recurrence. The report made a number of recommendations, which provide a useful framework for a risk management strategy. Well-thought-out systems, processes, protocols and guidelines which are the very essence of practice management should combine to form part of the risk management strategy for the practice. The continuum of risk management can be summarised by a number of guiding principles that fall into one of the following four categories: risk awareness, risk control, risk containment, and risk transfer. Innovation involves an element of risk taking and uncertainty. The vision of the primary care model of the future with different types of provision will be threatened if the workforce is not sufficiently flexible and willing to adapt to different ways of working.
