Risk Assessment for Researchers: Relevant, Realistic, Reasonable?

Last year the leading university risk financing Unimutual paid out close to $4M for research that was lost, damaged or seriously interrupted by the failure of temperature-controlled environments. These losses were preventable. In addition to being a large financial burden for the sector, this represents hundreds of articles which will never be published, numerous research grants which will never be extended, and dozens of post-graduate students whose studies were seriously disrupted. (Harry Rosenthal, Regis Unimutual General Manager, Risk Management Services).

In 2009 the Australian Maritime College, an institute of the University of Tasmania, introduced risk assessments as a core component of research funding applications. Training in risk management and assessment was made available to all researchers and postgraduate candidates in groups and one-on-one. A softly-softly approach was adopted, recognising that the addition of a risk assessment could be seen as yet another “time-consuming” administrative task, detracting from the “real” research.

This poster will illustrate the need for and the benefits of risk assessments, their importance as a planning tool and an innovative way we developed to “get the message across”.