This article reviews the main approaches to the interpretation of the term “risk”, which has acquired the status of a general scientific and widely interpreted concept. The unresolved issues of surgical risk terminology make it extremely difficult to solve the problem of perioperative prognosis at the narrow professional (medical) level. The author considers the problem of objectifying operational risk at an interdisciplinary level. In his opinion, understanding risk as a specific form of the subject’s active relation to the surrounding reality is the most justified at the present time. The essential particular features of such activities are the lack of confidence and the subject’s uncertainty in achieving the stated goal since a doctor’s professional activity takes place under conditions of risk, uncertainty and in contradictory situations.