Dr Cathal O'Keeffe
Clinical Risk Insights Editorial – Winter 2019
In this edition's editorial, Dr Cathal O'Keeffe, Head of Clinical Risk in the State Claims Agency discusses the strategic priorities and remit of our Clinical Risk Unit.
Welcome to the first edition of Clinical Risk Insights, which is brought to you by the State Claims Agency (SCA).
Clinical Risk Unit - Our strategic priorities
The SCA indemnifies the HSE and other publicly funded health and social care organisations. The SCA also has a risk management mandate and indemnified organisations have a statutory obligation under the National Treasury Management Agency (Amendment) Act 2000 to report incidents and claims to the SCA.
The Clinical Risk Unit is one of the business units of the SCA and our mission is to innovate, promote, sponsor and support patient safety initiatives, drawing on data analysis and evidence.
Dr Cathal O’Keeffe Head of Clinical Risk, State Claims Agency
The Clinical Risk Unit is one of the business units of the SCA and our mission is to innovate, promote, sponsor and support patient safety initiatives, drawing on data analysis and evidence. We also aim to inform policy, regulations, standards and clinical risk management strategies at local and national level in collaboration with key stakeholders.
What we do
We aim to deliver our strategic objectives by:
- Reviewing, analysing and extracting learning from patient/service user safety incident and claims data
- Sharing that learning with health and social care enterprises and national stakeholders to inform risk mitigation strategies at local and national level
- Support health and social care enterprises and clinical risk management
- Providing advice on risk management and clinical indemnity
- Providing advice on the development of risk policies, regulations and standards at national level
- Developing, sponsoring and supporting safety initiatives
- Delivering education and training programmes
Clinical Risk Insights will be published on a regular basis and through it we aim to provide our stakeholders with news on current issues relating to clinical risk and safety and quality as well as providing advice and guidance derived from our analysis of National Incident Management System (NIMS) data and claims analysis.
In this issue, you will find an update on Open Disclosure, as well as articles on communication, medication safety and a clinical vignette relating to a claim where documentation came under the spotlight.
We hope you find Clinical Risk Insights will help you in your day-to-day work and we would love to hear your feedback.