Mental health nursing · Risk assessment
Original set
Eleven dice = One patient
Eleven dice, six faces each, rolled in order. The first few build a person. The later ones complicate them.
Click the highlighted box to roll, or press Roll next die.
Created by Avril Montgomery, Edinburgh Napier University.
In practice, information about a person rarely arrives all at once. It emerges over time, and sometimes it changes what you thought you knew. TRIAGED is designed to mirror that: each die brings new information, and your clinical decision making has to adapt as it lands.
- Roll one die at a time, in order.
- As a group, build the result into your person combining what you have learned in university and in clinical practice. How might this present in someone, and how does it fit with what you already know? The dice give you the prompt; your knowledge and experience supply the detail.
- Before you roll again, note the risks this raises and your rationale. Be ready to revise earlier assessments as new information emerges.
- When every die has been rolled, decide what you would do next.
In preparation
Your patient
Work through it as a handover. What is your immediate risk assessment, what would you ask next, and which of these would you want a second opinion on?
Before you start
This activity puts self-harm, suicide and abuse disclosure in front of students deliberately, because they will be working with them in practice. Brief the group first, agree how someone signals they want to step out, and leave time for debrief. There is fuller guidance on running it with a group.
This is an educational tool where participants generate a composite service user via dice rolls. While we encourage participants to draw on their own practice experiences, no roll describes a real person, and no combination is meant to be read as a predictive risk score. .