Indemnity at the push of a button
Medical indemnity cover is a regulatory requirement for doctors, but few relish gathering all the information when it comes to annual renewal or when looking for competitive quotes.
Fiona Booth explores how an enhancement to Healthcode’s The Private Practice Register can streamline the process.
‘Declare the past, diagnose the present, foretell the future.’ Hippocrates
Healthcare is not without risk and practitioners deal in risk assessment every day. Getting the right medical indemnity cover for your specialty is not just about the cost or the financial risk, but also the stress or possible reputational implications of litigation from a dissatisfied patient.
Medical indemnity cover aims to protect the practitioner if they are accused of negligence, malpractice or a breach of clinical or professional care standards. According to a leading insurer, common medical indemnity claims include:
Misdiagnosis;
Failure to diagnose;
Surgical errors;
Incorrect treatment;
Prescription errors;
Failure to provide a clean environment;
Failing to adequately train doctors and other staff.
One of the many recommendations from The Paterson Inquiry was for the Government to look at reforming the regulation of indemnity products for healthcare professionals and introducing a nationwide ‘safety net’ to ensure patients are not left uncompensated.
While it is now over two years since the Department of Health and Social Care’s (DHSC) consultation on ‘appropriate clinical negligence cover’, there is, as I write, still no date for the much-anticipated Government response.
The outcome will affect the private sector, as the consultation was about indemnity cover for healthcare professionals who purchase their own indemnity cover, as they are not covered by existing or proposed state-backed schemes.
Current indemnity concerns
The consultation document highlighted concerns over the stability of the most popular forms of indemnity cover.
Currently, indemnity providers such as medical defence organisations (MDOs) provide cover for many healthcare professionals under discretionary indemnity arrangements, usually sold as subscription to a MDO.
The MDO model has served the private healthcare sector well for a long time, but after Paterson and other high-profile claims, many practitioners want certainty in these more litigious times, particularly if their MDO was unwilling or unable to settle a claim.
The Medical Practitioners Assurance Framework (MPAF)
MPAF was launched in October 2019 by the Independent Healthcare Providers Network, also partly in response to the Paterson scandal. The MPAF has been adopted by all private hospital groups and is considered as evidence of good governance by the Care Quality Commission as a way of meeting its ‘Well Led’ key line of inquiry.
Under MPAF, hospitals now need to have additional information in order to grant and oversee their practising privileges, including the requirement for practitioners to hold a valid certificate of adequate insurance cover or medical indemnity.
At Healthcode, we are aligning The Private Practice Register (The PPR) with the MPAF to help practitioners and hospitals fulfil their obligations without having a huge administrative burden. The PPR already records both historical and current medical indemnity policy information, allowing practitioners to demonstrate the continuation of adequate cover.
Competitive quote
The latest enhancement to The PPR allows doctors to obtain a competitive insurance quote for mandatory medical indemnity cover using data from their profile.
This enhancement is designed to eliminate the need to repeatedly gather the relevant information and complete multiple application forms to obtain quotes.
In fact, by having an up-to-date profile, practitioners will be able to save time and resources, and potentially money spent on adequate cover.
As almost all the required information is already held within The PPR, this data can now be used to obtain an online quotation at a click of a button, with no need to complete multiple forms. This proposal form will be pre-populated using data held within the PPR profile and can be amended, checked or supplemented by updating the relevant field in the profile.
The quotation will be fulfilled by Doctors’ Indemnity and Arthur J Gallagher Insurance Brokers Limited, a Lloyds’ market medical indemnity broker. Both companies are authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Quotations via the PPR are available free of charge, with no obligation to buy.
The PPR can help ease your admin burden by minimising duplication of effort and data. But it is still vital that practitioners understand the difference between discretionary and contractual indemnity and choose the most appropriate cover for their needs.
Medical indemnity is complex, but with an up-to-date profile, at least the insurance quotation process can be less painful.
Fiona Booth (right) is head of external affairs and stakeholder engagement at Healthcode