ABSTRACT
The importance of assessing and managing ‘risks’ has moved up the agenda, both in health care and in other areas of our lives. This chapter explores various dilemmas relating to risk, using stories to explore the legal context and the principles which both the law and good practice suggest. It presents and applies a number of different practice ‘tools’, which can support nurses to have more balanced conversations about risk with families and colleagues, to enable older people to do the things that matter to them, and to help them to think about the emotional impact of working with complexity, where there often is not one clear ‘right’ answer. Becoming more aware of the impact of the language we use and gently challenging others to do the same is not ‘political correctness gone mad’; it is a first step to having more balanced conversations about risk with older people, their families, and other professionals.
