All too often, service users, health professionals, policy makers, educators, and researchers draw upon risk management frameworks without reflecting critically on their assumptions or limitations. This book is designed to promote ‘risk literacy’. It introduces the reader to a range of issues, often unrecognized, which underlie all health risk management. The book is designed for practitioners, managers, educators, policy makers, researchers, service users, and members of the public who are concerned with health risks. It will help readers to critically evaluate the claims made about organized ... More

All too often, service users, health professionals, policy makers, educators, and researchers draw upon risk management frameworks without reflecting critically on their assumptions or limitations. This book is designed to promote ‘risk literacy’. It introduces the reader to a range of issues, often unrecognized, which underlie all health risk management. The book is designed for practitioners, managers, educators, policy makers, researchers, service users, and members of the public who are concerned with health risks. It will help readers to critically evaluate the claims made about organized responses to identified risks in an informed and critical way. The topics covered in the book are illustrated through real clinical examples that demonstrate their relevance for practice. The book unpicks the core elements of risk-thinking; namely, categorization, valuing, inductive probabilistic reasoning, and time-framing. It then reviews key issues relating to organized health risk management: encoding, media representation and influence, regulation, and the patient safety agenda. The concluding chapter analyses responses to the 2009 swine flu pandemic in order to illustrate and draw together the themes discussed in the book.