An audit of psychology risk screen completion across five time points and consideration of risk content

Abstract

This paper describes an audit of completion of psychology risk-screens by psychology staff across a 20-month period, taken at five time-points, in a single North London Borough. A dramatic improvement in completion rate was observed over this period. For the final audit period (May, 2022) the extent of co-occurrence of self-harm/self-injury (SIB) and aggression was assessed and a strong positive association was observed.Easy to read summaryIn our learning disabilities team we need to make sure the people we meet are safe. We ask people if they hurt themselves or other people. We need to keep a note of this so we can try to help. This is called a risk assessment. We had a look at our notes to see if we were good at doing risk assessments. To start with we noticed that we were not doing many. We tried harder. Every few months for nearly two years we checked. In the end we had got a lot better at doing risk assessments. We also found that if someone hurts themself it is more likely that they might try to hurt someone else, even if they do not do this on purpose.