Recently I met one of my old schoolmates who is on holiday here from overseas. In the course of our conversation, he told me that he is now working as a Risk Management Consultant in America.

It certainly was an impressive sounding title. Curious, I asked him about his job - and learned that his work involved undertaking a detailed assessment of the businesses that employed him, and then advising them how they could minimize the risk of accidents in their workplace. He also had to advise businesses that had suffered an industrial accident how they could rebuild or modify their workplace to prevent such accidents happening again.

While listening to this description of his work, I could not help thinking how similar his job was to mine. After all, isn’t what we as doctors try to do with patients who consult us best described as Risk Management Consultancy?

On many occasions, we see patients after they have had their "accident" – whether it is a heart attack or the discovery of a very high blood sugar level or a large bowel tumour – and in these instances our job is to either get them into a coronary care unit of a hospital as fast as possible or confirm the diagnosis of diabetes and institute lifelong management or find a good specialist to deal with the colon cancer. With diseases such as these, we as GPs send our patients on to the experts – but once the interventional cardiologist/cardiac surgeon or endocrinologist/diabetes specialist or gastroenterologist/colorectal surgeon has done his or her part, we have to pick up the pieces and continue management. Our role here, like my old schoolmate, is to ensure that the patients rehabilitate themselves and institute measures to prevent the "accident" happening again.

In other situations – and this is becoming increasingly common as patients and the government appreciate the value of preventive health- GPs can play a very effective role as Risk Management Consultants to their patients. Identifying those who have a strong family history of heart disease and have allowed their blood pressure and cholesterols to gradually creep up, spotting those patients who are overweight, over-waisted and under-exercised, recognizing those who are at risk of colonic cancer – is this not what is meant by Risk Assessment?

We can carry the analogy further. If a doctor explains the benefits of reducing blood pressure and cholesterol to the patient at risk of heart disease (and occasionally even motivates them to take medication), encourages the "pre-diabetic" patient to start losing weight and taking exercise to prevent them progressing to overt Diabetes, and persuades the patient whose father developed a colon cancer at the age of 55 years to undertake a test for bowel tumours - isn’t this what is meant by Risk Management?

Sadly, managing and reducing risk – and preventing fatal diseases – does not appear as glamorous to the public as seeing hospital doctors as in the TV shows rushing around authoritatively sticking needles and tubes into people or performing heroic surgery to a transplant a heart or remove a huge kidney cancer.

But like my schoolmate who helps businesses to prevent expensive accidents, a good family doctor can do more for society by preventing patients getting heart attacks, suffering the ravages of uncontrolled diabetes and dying from metastatic cancers.

Perhaps we doctors should also call ourselves Risk Management Consultants.

Maybe our patients will then take our advice more seriously.