ABSTRACT

In the course of everyday practice, health professionals are making decisions about the care, planning and treatment of a patient. When doing so they are balancing the risks. Good risk management is asking 'what if' and putting procedures in place to avoid accidents and errors. It is not good risk management if measures are implemented as a result of an audit or an incident. Clinical governance is a framework designed to help healthcare professionals to continuously improve quality and safeguard standards of care. Health professionals' practice must be sensitive, relevant and responsive to the needs of individual patients and have the capacity to adjust, where and when appropriate, to changing circumstances. The health professional must know the limits of their competency and only undertake tasks and accept responsibilities for those tasks for which they are competent. A health professional might have to refuse to undertake a task where he is not properly trained to perform it.