Manual handling professionals seek to facilitate the safe and efficient tranfser of clients with functional difficulties.  Partaking in these transfers can introduce significant risk and risk assessment is regularly utilised to confirm where harm is liable to occur.  Are we, however, using risk assessment to its fullest potential, or do we as professionals limit consumers in the manner in which we use risk assessment?

This paper presents the merits of risk assessment as a tool to enhance the measured and justifiable engagement in activities.  It seeks to expand the remit of risk assessment beyond its legislative grounding, with a focus on danger and prediction of behaviour, to a dynamic clinical reasoning framework that confirms when and why actions are safe to engage in. Enabling therapists engage creatively in finding novel solutions to problems, risk assessment can avoid a focus on what cannot be done in favour of what can be done with greater certainty, accountability and transparency.