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RISK |
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Bottom Line |
“The chance that something (good or bad) will happen. Synonyms include absolute risk, chance, and probability. |
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Significance
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Risikogesellschaft is the title of a very influential book by Ulrich Beck, one of the Guru’s of European Sociology – Risikogesellschaft. The Risk Society describes how the key feature of post modern life is risk. The modern world was focused on progress, the post modern world the risk but Public Health professionals have always been in the risk business.
The word itself of course has many different meanings. Some people use it only to refer to the ability of a bad outcome, for others it is neutral but few people use it without any additional implication. It is a loaded term and therefore must be used with great care.
Risk communication is a core public health skill and Public Health professionals are rarely operating on an empty field, often they are seeking to counter probabilities, risks, as they are expressed by a pressure group or by Industry. In global spin the ways in which industry presents risk in the light was favourable to itself, namely avoiding state control is described. It is scared to death. The other side of the case is put and in this book the author accuses Public Health professionals and health campaigners from magnifying risks to increase their status power and sometimes their funding. Wittgenstein said that when a term causes more confusion than clarity it is time to stop using it; this may be the time not for the term risk in Public Health practice.
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Examples of how the term is used; Extract from the Better Value Healthcare 21st Century Glossary |
1. “Analyses of decision making commonly distinguish risky and riskless choices. The paradigmatic example of decision under risk is the acceptability of a gamble that yields monetary outcomes with specified probabilities. A typical riskless decision concerns the acceptability of a transaction in which a good or a service is exchange for money or labor.”
2. “The chance that something (good or bad) will happen. Synonyms include absolute risk, chance, and probability.
3. “In 1982 Britain’s Royal Society published a report called Risk Assessment. ….. The 1983 report distinguished between objective risk – the sort of thing ‘the experts’ know about – and perceived risk – the lay person’s often very different anticipation of future events. Not surprisingly, given the report’s provenance, it approached its subject scientifically. This is how it defined the subject of its study in 1983:
The Study Group views ‘risk’ as the probability that a particular adverse event occurs during a stated period of time, or results from a particular challenge. As a probability in the sense of statistical theory, risk obeys all the formal laws of combining probabilities.
The Study Group also defined detriment as:
a numerical measure of the expected harm or loss associated with an adverse event … It is generally the integrated product of risk and harm and is often expressed in terms such as costs in £s, loss in expected years of life or loss of productivity, and is needed for numerical exercises such as cost-benefit analysis or risk-benefit analysis.” Source: Adams, J. (1995) Risk. UCL Press. (p.7-8).
4. .“…….defined in narrow technical terms as a probability of a negative event, such as a vaccine-adverse event happening in a particular instance.”
5. “The theoretical content and the value reference of risks imply additional components: the observable conflictual pluralizsation and multiplicity of definitions of civilization’s risks. There occurs, so to speak, an over-production of risks, which sometimes relativize, sometimes supplement and sometimes outdo one another. One hazardous product might be defended by dramatizing the risks of the others (for example, the dramatization of climatic consequences ‘minimizes’ the risk of nuclear energy.” Source: Beck, U (1992) Risk Society Towards a New Modernity. Sage Publications. (p.31).
6. “The term “risk” has several senses. The one I aintend has to do with uncertaintly, but not necessarily regarding a dangerous event, such as a plane crash, because one can also be uncertain about a positive outcome, such a a successful landing.” Source: Gigerenzer, G. (2003) Reckoning With Risk. Penguin Books (p.26).
7. “To most people, the word risk means “danger”: for example, “lion taming is a high-risk hobby.” But risk” is also used to mean the chance that something will happen to you: for example, “in this group fo patients, the risk of heart attach is about 10 percent.” Source: Wooloshin, S., Schwartz, L.M., Welch, H.G.(2008) Know Your Chances: Understanding |
