The government’s proposals to require healthcare professionals to hold either insurance or indemnity as a condition of registration is excellent news for doctors and their patients.
It is rare for doctors to have no cover in place but this new requirement will mean that patients can be secure in the knowledge that there will be access to compensation in the event that harm occurs.
The government also recognised the need to increase awareness about indemnity and insurance amongst both the public and professionals. This is also excellent news. Making more information available means doctors and their patients are better informed when making their choices.
We believe that is essential that doctors have protection in place that ensures that they are able to ask for help at any time even if it is years after the adverse event occurred. Clinical negligence cases are often brought many years after the event. In one case that MPS supported, a claim was brought over 20 years after the event occurred. The doctor may have retired, moved abroad or taken a break from practice, and it is important that the patient is still able to access financial redress.
The real strength of the discretionary occurrence based indemnity model is its flexibility. Unlike an insurance policy, where an insurer must refuse cover if the circumstances fall outside the terms of the policy or if the policy has lapsed, discretionary indemnity has no exclusions.
In a recent case, a doctor was jailed for falsifying paperwork to make it appear that he had visited a sick patient before her condition deteriorated. That he did this because his insurance had lapsed is a striking example of the limitations of the insurance based model.
MPS has always stressed that doctors should have the choice between discretionary indemnity and insurance. We choose to provide discretionary occurrence indemnity as it is flexible, has no caps, and provides protection long into the future.
Source: Medical Protection Society