QUEK KAI JIE

Background information of our project

Our project aims to assist Changi General Hospital Office of Risk Management with conducting a focus group survey to support the development of the Enterprise Risk Management and Training (E&T) Roadmap and Curriculum.

The focus group surveys would help provide a better understanding of the situation on the ground and current practices/concerns CGH’s frontline staff risk awareness and ability to sense, manage and escalate risk events as part of their day-to-day activities. Our interviewees are all CGH’s frontline staff, which includes Nurses, Patient Service Associates (PSAs) and Allied Health Professionals (AHPs).

Nurses take care of and assist the patients when they are warded or when they are visiting the clinic.

AHPs consist of Speech Therapists, Physiotherapists, Radiographers, Pharmacists etc.

PSAs handle the admin work for the hospital when patients visit or leave the clinic.

All three types of jobs come into direct contact and interact with patients and their families for their day to day work.

These front-line staff are selected as they are the ones who interact the most with the public during their day to day work and have the highest risk of being put into situations caused by misunderstandings, high human traffic etc. affecting CGH's reputation, operations and staff morale.

Records of the activities we've done

We started the project from scratch, going through processes like:

1. Setting of objectives

So as to ensure we understand what we need to achieve at the end of the project so we will know what are the areas which we need to be fully clear of

2. Enterprise risk management crash courses

So as to better understand Enterprise Risk Management. Initially, we saw risk as those that may cause physical harm to others eg.fire, sharp edges. However, after a total of 15 hours crash course, we managed to view risk at a greater view. There is a risk in everything we do, for instance, there is a risk in taking buses to and fro the hospital as bacteria and diseases can spread fast in a small area.

3. Tour of the hospital

So as to understand the working areas of our interviewees to be able to understand their description when they reply to our interview questions

4. Going through risk management survey questions on the internet

So as to gain inspiration for the crafting of our own survey questions

5. Crafting our own survey questions

6. Going through series of vettings of survey questions with our mentors

So as to ensure that our survey questions will get us to what we want to achieve. We also have a short interviewing time so we had to prioritise some questions and cut some of the less important questions out.

7. Creating a short two minutes introduction before we start the interview

So as to give our interviewees an idea about where we are coming from and what we are aiming to achieve so they will answer us based on what we hope to achieve

8.Making guiding slides for interview process

Some of our interviewees might not be able to understand our survey questions at the first time so guiding slides with questions and images would be able to help them

9. Collating all survey replies and analysing them

10. Completing our final report

3 skills needed/content knowledge learnt

Presence of a hazard does not necessarily mean an incident will happen. In order for a hazard to escalate to become a risk, an action must be present. For instance, there is an uneven carpet on the ground (hazard), John walks on it (action), thus he falls down (incident). So in order to prevent incidents from happening, people need to speak up when they spot something wrong regardless of whether it concerns them so as to prevent incidents from happening.
Risks and opportunities are present in everything we do and we have to weigh them. eg) a certain paper and pulp business” owns the whole supply chain of paper production. The pros of this would be that they can save more money as they need not pay external suppliers for materials but the cons would be that they have to know every single thing of the whole supply chain and managing such a big chain would be challenging.
We were told to view things from different perspectives. For instance, the case of a woman pooping along the causeway. Instead of purposely exposing the woman and shaming her, we should take things to a different point of view. We could have focused on the reason which caused her to have such an action, with that being the traffic jam along the causeway and how to solve this problem. In other words, we should have gotten to the root of the problem instead of jumping into conclusion that the woman is “uncivilised”

2 interesting aspects of our learning

Risk management can be viewed from different perspectives. Eg if we were to rate the level of risk we face when we bungee jump, ride a plane, go for surgery, go for a swim, we can view the risks from different perspectives, for instance, extent of impact or fatality rate. Different people will have different ratings as they view from different points. Someone might rate going for surgery the most dangerous thing as there are high numbers of deaths when people go for surgery in comparison to others, some people might rate riding a plane the most dangerous thing as one plane crash may kill a lot of people. Some might rate bungee jumping as the most dangerous thing as falling from the bungee rope might mean immediate death.
We were told that even though something may not affect us directly at the start, we might face consequences of neglecting it at the end through a story session.

Setting: Farm

Who: Mouse, Snake, Chicken, Cow, Farmer and wife and guests

What: Mouse found a mice trap somewhere in the farm but knows that it cannot remove it alone so he went to find the snake, chicken and cow for help. However, all three animals did not render help because they felt that the mice trap does not affect them. So one day, the snake was slithering around the farm but suddenly got caught in the mice trap. The Farmer’s wife passed by and tried to free it, but the poisonous snake bit her and poisoned her. The Farmer’s wife fell really sick and the farmer decided to kill the chicken to make some chicken soup, in hope that it will make his wife feel better. The Farmer’s relatives heard about his wife and came to visit. As such, the Farmer then killed the cow to cook a meal for all his relatives. At the end of the story, the snake, chicken and cow died. As incidences normally occur because a hazard is overlooked or belittled, we should always raise up hazards and concerns regardless of whether it affects us directly because we might be faced with consequences at the very end.

1 takeaway for life

We should always view things from different perspectives and not jump straight into conclusion. In order to solve a problem fully, we need to get to the root cause of the problem and not just see things from our own perspective, from a shallow point of view. For instance, if there is a group project that does not go smoothly because one group member’s part was incomplete. Many people will blame this group mate, but to solve the problem, we have to get to the root cause of the problem and think of WHYS. Maybe the workload isn’t split equally? Maybe the content of that member’s part isn’t easy to research on? Instead of pushing the blame to this one person, we need this group mate to share about her/his reason which caused her inability to complete her work and try to work out a solution together.

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