Medical Insurance Consultants of Yeovil - Insurance For Medical Professionals and Surgery Insurance

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Keeping Your Practice Fully Covered

There are many areas of insurance that should be considered when reviewing how well your practice is covered. You should ensure that the cover provided links all areas of your work together smoothly. The three key elements to a fully covered practice are; Surgery Property Insurance, Locum Insurance together with Individual and Corporate Medical Malpractice Insurance. The reasoning behind saying these are your three key elements is the way in which they complement each other in covering your practice needs.

Your Surgery Insurance is there to provide cover for your buildings, contents, business interruption, public and employers liabilities and in most cases your commercial legal protection. All of these areas are fundamental to the running of your practice if the worst should happen, as well as complying with current legislation.

When you come to insure your surgery make sure that you know what is covered - assuming something is covered doesn’t work when a claim is declined. All risks cover is one such area - does it include ‘walk in theft’? This is the best way to make sure the cover you have is as good as it gets. Making sure that the refrigerated drugs section of the policy meets your requirements is very important, as you would not believe the number of claims we receive for the fridge being switched off and spoiling drugs inside it.

The MIC policy also has the added benefit of including a seasonal increase of 60 per cent to your refrigerated drugs during September, October and November to cover the flu vaccine season. To ensure that no problems arise during any future claims, disclosing the material facts, such as previous claims history or construction of property, is vital at quotation stage. Beware of hidden excesses, terms and/or conditions (this is becoming more commonplace), which may be placed on your policy by insurers after you have accepted their quotation!

Due to our extensive knowledge of how the modern day medical practice functions, we are able to guide practices through the sections of the policy that are needed. One last point – don’t fall for the  ‘cheap premiums provide good cover’ scenario – it usually leads to problems in the future. Put another way ‘cream always rises to the top’.

Your Locum Insurance Cover is the most cost effective way to ensure that when your key staff become ill, or have an accident that prevents them from working. Locum Insurance can be used to provide reimbursement for the expense of employing a locum or temp, or paying the remaining doctors or staff for covering the extra workload. Some may see this insurance as non-essential to the running of their practice, and given that fifteen years ago this was a relatively new product, they may think that this is still the case.

Fifteen years is a long time and with the costs associated with employing a locum, assuming you can get one in the first instance, this insurance has now become one of the cornerstone covers to have in place. Costs for a locum can range from £200 to £600 a day, depending on where in the country you are. This doesn’t seem very much until you start totting up the days – an example being a doctor breaking his leg and is off work for eight weeks the cost to the practice could be as much as £12,000, assuming your policy has a four week deferred period.

Once again digging a little deeper in to what you are actually buying is vital – not all locum policies are the same. Not covering or partially covering pre-existing conditions as standard, how long you have to make a claim for a recurring condition, geographical restrictions if you are sick, what you are allowed to do when you do claim - these are just a few of the niggly points where policies can vary. Think of what you want from the insurance before you look to buy it.

You want to know that everybody on the policy is properly covered from the start of the cover. The last thing that you want is to submit a claim and be told by the insurer that the condition was excluded and therefore the claim is denied. This makes the insurance a pointless piece of paper. Also, by opting for the cheapest premium you usually find it means you have bought cover that is restrictive.

A broad, well defined and flexible policy with individual medical underwriting will make things a lot easier – you will know exactly what is and what is not covered. The market leading MIC policy is so flexible that it can cater for almost any type of deferred period, no preimposed capping of the benefit you request, because we believe that you know best when it comes to how much you would need and how you would like to spend it.

Medical Malpractice Insurance is the next area you should look at in your practice, because without them the practice would not be what it is today or in the future. Do all medical staff hold their own medical malpractice cover and, vitally, does it cover them for all the activities that they perform on behalf of the practice? Again most people would say of course it does, but does it?

Some activities that may be carried out by an individual may actually not be covered by their indemnity provider, for example acupuncture which is an activity that is not immediately covered by someone’s indemnity. Review what is it that you do in your practice and if you are uncertain, contact the insurer or defence organisation and ask them the question.

Another point of interest in this area that is becoming more common place within healthcare providers is the clubbing together of practices to provide services under contract to the PCT/PCO, by forming a company through which to funnel these services down to individual practices and practitioners. A warning here, as soon as you form a limited company and use that company to provide services, you have created a separate legal entity that can be found liable for its errors.

Like an individual practitioner who holds their own medical malpractice, the company should be looking to have its own professional indemnity cover, as the company has vicarious liability for the errors of its employees, be they employed or self-employed. MIC can help a practice in both of these areas, providing individual medical malpractice insurance and corporate professional indemnity cover, all tailored specifically for the medical professions.

Authors: Simon Downing (Policy Director - MIC), Steven May (Property Underwriter MIC)
Publication: Scottish Primary Care p12 September 2008