Risk Assessment in Mental Health Settings

Risk Assessment in Mental Health
Settings
 Particularly it focuses on enhancing the quality and security of services of health-
care by distinguishing the opportunities and conditions that expose patients
at risk of damage and afterward acting to counteract those risks.
 There are three types of risk assessment:
 Unstructured clinical judgement -based on experience. knowledge and intuition.
 Actuarial risk assessment – a factual technique for assessing the danger of specific
event occurrence (VRAG, static 99)
 Structured professional judgement -combines empirical data with clinical
judgement (HCR-20)

Approaches to Risk Assessment
 Unstructured clinical Judgement
 This method relies intensely on non-verbal and verbal
signals and this has the capability of affecting risk
appraisal for an individual clinician, and therefore this has
a high likelihood of over-reliance in the evaluation on the
depicted prompts.
 The approaches to this type of assessment tends to be
subjective and informal.
 It is commonly used as the approach towards the appraisal
of violence risk for an individual.

Actuarial risk assessment
 The approach was obtained from the industry of insurance; it utilizes
a scientific technique to determine the outcome.
 It is based on the probability of statistics by producing a risk
estimate from a particular group of data. This approach also tries to
predict the risk individuals by considering their actions in the future
and observe other people’s behavior in situations that are
comparable.
 The approach also gets rid of the issue subjective clinical assessment
by focusing on actuarial risk assessment to apprise the process of
decision making.