What is professional indemnity insurance?

Professional indemnity insurance protects you, the practitioner, against any mistake you may make in your practice or accusations that you may have done something wrong when you may not have. It protects against malpractice, negligence and misconduct and any costs or claims made against you, the practitioner. This insurance needs to cover all the modalities that you are qualified for if you wish to include them in your practice.

What is public liability insurance?

Public liability insurance protects against a third party incident or injury on your property and most often includes another component, product liability insurance, which protects against damage or injury caused to another person by a product you are making or supplying.

Homeopathic practitioners require both professional indemnity and public liability insurance

At the current time AHA has identified three companies that cover allied health practitioners with the required ‘Professional Indemnity and Public Liability Insurances’ (combined):

• Insurance.com.au: professional indemnity and public liability insurance brokers
• GSA – landing page for AHA members: www.gsaib.com.au/associations/insurance-for-aha
• Arthur J Gallagher: Professional indemnity insurance | Gallagher AU

Other insurers, such as AON, Guild, QBE, Allianz, YOUI, AAMI, GIO, may provide full insurance or only offer partial insurance. Refer to their brokers for confirmation and individual quotes.

Covid-19

Since the Covid-19 pandemic, most companies have added exclusions to their policies in relation to Covid-19 and other listed or infectious diseases.

How to obtain insurance

Decide on the type of cover required.

(I)  Basic essentials: professional indemnity and public liability insurances (combined)

(II) Extra cover could include:

• building and clinic contents
• income protection
• cyber liability regarding computer viruses, worms, trojans, misuse of data, hackers, privacy breaches, defamation and harassment.