Seniors’ Health

Upcoming Webinars

SHD Webinar Series: 

A Balanced and Broadened Approach to Risk Assessment

Heather McLeod
Wednesday May 14, 2025 7-8 pm EST

Older adults living with complex health needs have a right to live with risk similar to all other individuals, yet when they interact with the health care system, clinicians tend to overprotect older adults when there are safety concerns and over focus on the potential negative and physical consequences. Clinicians should instead be engaging older adults in a balanced, broadened and strength-based approach to risk assessment and management. This type of approach leverages older adults’ strengths and considers the negative and positive emotional, social and physical consequences of perceived risky decisions. Learning how to have a broaden and balanced approach to risk assessment has led to improvements in communication, clinical thinking, decision making and efficiencies in the care process and had decreased the moral distress that clinicians sometimes feel in these situations. The Living with Risk: Decision Support Approach (LwR:DSA) is an approach to risk assessment that incorporates and operationalizes these elements and is especially useful when there is a difference of opinions about the care plan. 

Speaker:  Heather MacLeod has spent her career supporting programs and systems to offer the best possible care and services to facilitate older adults and their care partners to age well; first as a clinician, then as a manager and most recently as a knowledge translation specialist. She is completing her Doctor of Science in Rehabilitation and Health Leadership with a focus in Implementation Science and is currently the Manager, Programs and Partnerships at the Provincial Geriatrics Leadership Ontario office. She started her journey into studying risk assessment back in 2010 from feeling dissatisfied with her conversations with both older adults and their caregivers.

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Canada’s aging population heightens the need for all health professionals to understand the bio-psychological changes of aging and their impacts on individuals’ ability to manage acute and chronic health conditions and maintain independent, active lives. Older adults increasingly make up the majority of patient populations across the continuum of health care from community to acute and post-acute practice settings. As primary care practitioners, physiotherapists need to develop specialized expertise in the comprehensive assessment and treatment of older adults with complex health conditions.