Introduction
Just like in any other organization, there is need to have a risk management program in a hospice. New employees in hospice suffer from depression and stress. They handle patients with multiple illnesses and they meet dead patients every day and this adds more work of comforting their families (Dingemans, J., et al., 2017). This is because mostly in their training they are not fully equipped with specialized skills to enable them handle dying patients. It focuses on providing support to people in the final phase focus on the quality and comfortability of a patient’s life. A hospice concentrates on the comfort of a patient rather than their cure. A risk management program is designed for identification of possible events likely to affect an organization (Dingemans, J., et al., 2017). It is also meant for protection and minimization of risks to the organization’s employees, property and services. Risk management enhances continuity of an organization’s activities by limiting its liabilities.
Elements
There are various important factors required for the implementation of an effective risk management program (Mortimer, S. T., & Mortimer, D., 2015). They include:
- Vision. An effective risk management program should be relevant to the organization’s vision. The challenge mostly faced by the new employees in a hospice is to determine how much risk they are prepared to and accept to create a credit value. Therefore, a risk management program should establish where the hospice is today and the future plans in relation to the ability of dealing with a risk. For a vision to be established, the five W’s (who, where, why, when and what) should be identified.
2.Correlation. For a risk management program to be effective, there’s need to share information from one department to another. This calls for correlation across the hospice since its impossible for a risk management plan to be achieved with a “silo mentality (Mortimer, S. T., & Mortimer, D.,2015)”. On realizing this, many organizations have seen the need for the hospice to appoint a Chief Risk officer to serve as a “link” between the various departments to come up with a risk management program.
3.Target driven.
An effective risk management program should be focused on achieving a target or goal. It calls for a unique approach for purposes of analysis. The following are the categories under which a risk management framework is established: Strategic, operations, reporting and compliance. The objectives of the organization should be included in these categories.
- Measurable. This program provides management tools and engages key elements such as: Internal environment, objectives, event identification, risk response and control activities and impact likelihood (Mortimer, S. T., & Mortimer, D.,2015) That format is challenging but leads to a logical quantitative and quantitative presentation. What we measure from this program provides a static and dynamic perspective. When properly done, the program serves as a very important document that: reduces operational strains and losses, assists in ensuring laws and regulations are complied to and also improves the ability of an organization to respond to a risk appropriately.
Role of Joint Commission
The Joint commission was founded in 1951 (Fakhry, C., Zevallos, J. P., & Eisele, D. W. 2017). It is an independent and non-profit organization. Its governed by 32 commissioner members (Fakhry, C., Zevallos, J. P., & Eisele, D. W. 2017). The mission statement of joint commission in healthcare organizations is to ensure continuous improvement on the safety and care quality provided to the public. Besides the mission, it also has goals which include: organization ownership, adoption of a management tool and continuous standards compliance. Joint commission plays a role in the accreditation and certification of health care organizations. In the accreditation art form, the commission is responsible for standard development, accreditation decision making and evaluation against standards.
In collaboration with other health professionals, Joint commission assesses healthcare organization to ensure standards are met. Joint commissions are committed in improving the safety and quality of healthcare. Their standards encourage the use of clinical practice guidelines.
Joint commission acts as a convener to mean it is the head of health cares, approximately more than 21,000 (Fakhry, C., Zevallos, J. P., & Eisele, D. W. 2017). It also acts a listener since with all issues concerning health. The commission also acts as a collaborator. As mentioned earlier, the commission collaborates with other health professional to improve the health status.
Roles of Different Levels of Personnel
Administrative personnel are professionals who provides administrative services and support to the personnel division. These personnel are also known as human resource assistants. One of the roles of the administrative personnel is preparing and maintaining all documentations. This includes both electronic and paper document (Renz, D. O., & Herman, R. D., Eds., 2016). The documents need to be secure especially the confidential ones. Supporting the department by ensuring accomplishment of assigned responsibilities on daily basis. This is done through: meeting coordination, event coordination and travel plan creating presentation and many others.
Enhancing employees’ relations is another role. Personnel administrative assists employees to the best of their ability unless the employee has the need to question other departments directly. This lies in a large discipline including: safety, benefits, salaries and training employees. Another role involves ensuring work safety through creation of hazard free environment. Training the employees to avoid unnecessary accidents is also an administrative role (Renz, D. O., & Herman, R. D., Eds., 2016).
Upholding the rights of the employees by ensuring compensations, salaries and benefits are received on time is another role. Administrative personnel are responsible for combining employee’s elements of relation into the selection and recruitment of the employer.
Relationship Between the Two.
According to risk management professionals, risk management is not risk compliance. Ethics are fundamental to security laws ( Mortimer, S. T., & Mortimer, D. 2015). The centrality of ethics has been recognized by leading standards therefore integrating ethics into elements of risk management and effective compliance. Ethics is so important to a person seeking to promote compliance with ethical standards.
Non-compliance is a type of risk. It can result in bad outcomes like any other risk. To add on this, compliance efforts fail since leaders do not anticipate future risk. There exists a set of coordinated and comprehensive policies, roles, procedures and responsibilities aimed at promoting an organizational culture which encourages commitment to law compliance (Mortimer, S. T., & Mortimer, D. 2015). Effective compliance with ethical standards and an effective risk management program both require: discussion about interrelated topics with leadership and an organization’s activities inventory and their organizations supporting mechanism.
Whenever a risk management program and compliance are handled by two different people in an organization, the separation mostly leads to isolation of compliance from other risks.
References
Fakhry, C., Zevallos, J. P., & Eisele, D. W. (2017). Imbalance Between Clinical and Pathologic Staging in the Updated American Joint Commission Cancer Staging System for Human Papillomavirus–Positive Oropharyngeal Cancer. Journal of Clinical Oncology, JCO-2017
Mortimer, S. T., & Mortimer, D. (2015). Quality and risk management in the IVF laboratory. Cambridge University Press.
Renz, D. O., & Herman, R. D. (Eds.). (2016). The Jossey-Bass handbook of nonprofit leadership and management. John Wiley & Sons
Dingemans, J., Bell, S., Mellish, S., & Plummer, S. (2017). P-246 New method for clinical risk management.
