Risk management program analysis
This is a document analysis, so the first task is finding a plan with enough content to analyse. Choose it before anything else — an organisation's one-page policy summary will not support a comparison.
Editorial process
Last reviewed · August 15, 2026
You need a real plan before you can analyse one
Everything depends on the document you find, so spend real effort there before drafting. The assignment warns you to look for a plan with sufficient content, and the warning is earned: many published risk management policies are a page of principles with no administrative detail, and no comparison can be built on one. Look for a full plan with a governance structure, a reporting pathway, defined committees, an event classification scheme and a review cycle. Public hospital systems, state health departments and university medical centres publish these. Once you have it, say what type of plan it is and why you chose it, which the first requirement asks for explicitly, and describe the organisation it applies to and what risk management does in that setting — a community hospital, an imaging centre and a long-term care facility all run different risks, and the plan you found should be read against the risks its own setting actually carries.
The comparison is the analytical core and it needs two lists, not one. Establish the standard administrative steps first from the accrediting body the assignment points you to, since a MIPPA-approved accreditor sets the requirements your example is supposed to meet. The standard cycle runs: identify risks, analyse and prioritise them, control or mitigate, finance the residual, then monitor and review, wrapped in incident reporting, root cause analysis, education and a governance line that reaches the board. Then set your example against it step by step and report what is present, what is absent and what is done differently. Absences are the most useful finding — a plan with no defined escalation to governance, or no stated review interval, has a gap you can name. Close with recommendations that follow from those gaps rather than from general good practice, since a recommendation the plan already contains reads as though you did not read it.
Likely learning objectives
Inferred from the brief — check these against your own rubric.
- 01Select a source document capable of supporting a structured comparison.
- 02Describe the organisational context that determines which risks matter.
- 03Establish a standard from an accrediting body rather than from general knowledge.
- 04Identify gaps by comparison and recommend against those gaps specifically.
Read the full question
Review every instruction before using the planning guidance that follows.
Course-wide instructions that accompany this question
You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes. Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages. Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor. The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.
Turn the brief into deliverables
- 01A 1,000-1,250 word paper.
- 02The plan type, its source and your rationale for choosing it.
- 03A description of the organisation and risk management's role in it.
- 04A step-by-step comparison against the accrediting body's standard.
- 05Recommendations that follow from identified gaps, with APA citations.
The plan, the organisation, the comparison, the gaps
The plan and why you chose it
Identify the plan type, its source and your rationale.
The organisation and its risks
Describe the setting and what risk management does there.
The standard from the accrediting body
Set out the expected administrative steps and processes.
The comparison
Match the example against the standard step by step.
Gaps and recommendations
Name what is missing and recommend changes that close those gaps.
Finding a plan and its accrediting standard
Recommended databases
- Published hospital and health system risk management plans
- The MIPPA-approved accrediting body for your chosen setting
- American Society for Health Care Risk Management
- Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
Search sequence
- 1.Find the document first and confirm it has governance, reporting and review detail before committing to it.
- 2.Identify which accreditor regulates your chosen setting, since MIPPA approval is setting-specific.
- 3.Read the accreditor's standards for the elements a plan must contain — that list becomes your comparison framework.
- 4.Look for published root cause analysis or incident reporting guidance to judge whether the example's process is adequate.
Reference shortlist
These are authoritative starting points, not a ready-made bibliography. A qualified reviewer must confirm that each source fits the assignment and supports the claim beside which it is cited.
Nothing here is cleared for citation until you have read it.
- 01
Advancing Health Care Risk Management
American Society for Health Care Risk Management · 2025
The professional body for health care risk management, and a source for what a complete programme contains.
- 02
Sentinel Event Data
The Joint Commission · 2024
Accreditor data on serious events, which grounds the comparison in what risk management is supposed to prevent.
- 03
Patient Safety and Quality Improvement
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality · 2024
Patient safety frameworks and reporting systems, useful for judging the example plan's reporting pathway.
- 04
International Patient Safety Goals
Joint Commission International · 2024
A published standard against which an example plan's controls can be checked.
Review before submission
Common mistakes
- Choosing a plan too thin to analyse, which makes the comparison impossible.
- Describing the standard and the example separately instead of comparing them.
- Skipping the accrediting body, which is where the standard is supposed to come from.
- Recommending measures the plan already contains.
- Treating risk management as clinical safety only, ignoring financial and reputational risk.
Submission checklist
- Does your chosen plan have administrative detail to compare?
- Have you identified the MIPPA-approved accrediting body for that setting?
- Is the comparison step by step rather than two descriptions?
- Have you named at least one absence in the example plan?
- Do your recommendations address gaps you actually found?
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Written by
Aaron Bishop
MA, Education
assignment interpretation and research-methods coaching across disciplines
Aaron leads the EssayCrackers editorial desk. He works on how assignment briefs are read — what a rubric is actually asking for, and where students most often answer a different question than the one set.

Reviewed by
Dr. Nathan Cole
PhD, Rhetoric & Composition
Argumentation and thesis development
Nathan teaches first-year composition and directs a university writing center. He reviews EssayCrackers guides for argumentative soundness and citation accuracy.