Examples of risk assessments in social care (with templates)

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Inconsistencies can be found across multiple practices within social care. But when it comes to risk assessments, creating a standardised process that is consistent, repeatable, and built to support delivering quality, person-centred care is crucial.  

To help reduce the risk of errors across the industry, this blog post covers the benefits of using different types of risk assessment templates to standardise your current process. With safety of everyone involved at the forefront, we’ve also included five key tips on what to identify to ensure proactive risk prevention.

Types of risk assessments in social care

Risk assessments in health and social care are essential for delivering quality care and mitigating risks. A few common examples of assessments used by most care providers include:

• Falls screening
• Behaviour
• Accessing the community
• Body mass index (BMI)
• Medication  

Assessments like these not only help you provide consistent, person-centred care, but also help prioritise needs, prevent incidents, and ensure safe and effective care for all parties involved.  

The most important thing to remember is that some clients may require multiple assessments, which is why analysing trends and understanding their previous health history is key.

Advantages of using risk assessment templates

Although risk assessments are an essential part of the care planning process, conducting an effective risk assessment can be challenging. This is especially true when the process isn’t standardised in the care sector.

"I often see care managers looking for risk assessment templates, so it is great to see Log my Care offering these examples."
- Mark Topps, Regional Business Manager and social care expert

To help you identify and implement different types of risk assessments in social care settings, the download above includes three of some of the most popular risk assessment templates that are highly favoured by our customers, which you can read about below.

Body Mass Index (BMI) template

Use our BMI risk assessment template to calculate a client’s BMI so that you can consider existing medical conditions, evaluate lifestyle factors, and determine potential risks based on the assessment.

The benefits of our BMI template include:

• Ensuring consistent and accurate BMI assessment, enabling proactive intervention and risk management
• Meeting compliance and documentation requirements for regulators like the Care Quality Commission (CQC)
• Streamlining the assessment process by having a ready-made template to provide relevant BMI categories and scoring
• Offering easy communication, collaboration, and handovers between different care providers
• Enabling tracking of BMI trends and early identification of potential risks.  

Waterlow template

Our Waterlow risk assessment template helps you gather necessary client information, assign scores based on risk factors, calculate the overall score, evaluate risk levels, and develop an appropriate care plan.

The benefits of our Waterlow template include:

• Simplifying assessments with a structured format and standardised scoring system
• Enhancing consistency and accuracy in identifying pressure ulcer risks
• Enabling systematic tracking of risk factors and early preventive care
• Facilitating communication between care teams for comprehensive risk management
• Ensuring regulatory compliance and comprehensive documentation.  

Moving and handling template

Our Moving and handling (or manual handling) risk assessment template enables you to identify the task at hand, assess a client’s physical capabilities and limitations, evaluate your environment, determine any necessary equipment, and provide training to those involved.

The benefits of our Moving and handling template include:

• Providing a framework for assessing risks in specific activities
• Identifying hazards to proactively prevent accidents or injuries
• Ensuring consistency in assessing capabilities and selecting appropriate equipment
• Streamlining documentation with a standardised template
• Enabling ongoing monitoring and adjustment of care plans.  

How to do a risk assessment in social care

As we mentioned before, the risk assessment process is not the same across the industry between care providers. This is why having templated assessments ready for you to use is a great advantage.  

But to make sure you cover all your bases, below are four key tips to conducting an assessment properly:

1. Identify and understand how risks in the client's life can affect their quality of life and wellbeing.
2. Identify and consider the perspectives of all individuals involved in identifying the risks.
3. Identify and determine the severity of risks, to establish high and low priority concerns while considering their emotional, social, and psychological impact.
4. Identify and evaluate the strategies used in the past to manage risks, and what measures are currently in place.

A bonus piece of advice from social care expert and Regional Business Manager, Mark Topps, is for anyone looking to build on their current assessment process:

“My top tip is to make sure they are person-centred and unrestricting. Unfortunately, I see many risk assessments that prevent people from doing things. We need to ensure they are not being risk-averse but instead supporting people to take positive risks.”

When done right, risk assessments help deliver safe and effective care between carers and clients. Much like a digital care plan, they also create a more seamless experience for all parties, while establishing an open line of communication in your care service.

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Our platform provides the flexibility and oversight that empowers you and your team to deliver the best care with less admin.

If you’re looking to start adding technology into your team’s workflow, these templates are an excellent step towards digitalisation, regardless of your service size.  

Not quite convinced? Our platform has over 40 templates. You can read more about how our customers successfully use our risk assessment templates for care plans, or schedule a free demo to see how it works within the platform.