FAQ: Professional Indemnity Insurance

The PII required for registration of health professionals is designed to cover the risks arising from a health practitioner’s provision of health care to a person.

Under the National Law, a registered health practitioner must not practise their profession unless they have appropriate PII arrangements in force. The Board may require a registrant to provide evidence of their professional indemnity arrangements at any time.

Your professional indemnity insurance must be adequate and appropriate insurance or professional indemnity cover. Your insurance provider is often best placed to advise you on what level of cover is adequate and appropriate for your practice. In order to enable them to make this judgement, you must provide your insurer or indemnifier with accurate and up-to-date information about the scope and nature of your practice. You need to be able to demonstrate that you fully disclosed your scope of practice and to justify your decisions about PII if asked to do so.

Your PII cover must include:

1. civil liability cover
2. appropriate retroactive cover for otherwise uncovered matters arising from prior practice, and
3. automatic reinstatement

or

the equivalent under third party PII arrangements.

If you are covered by a third party PII arrangement, it must meet the standard.

State and Territory governments have previously advised Ahpra that public hospital employees are covered by the government’s professional indemnity arrangements.

No. The PII requirements do not apply to a person granted ‘non-practising’ registration. A person with ‘non practising’ registration is not able to practice the profession.

There are a number of ways you can be covered:

As a registered health practitioner it’s important that you are aware of and understand the arrangements for your professional indemnity insurance.

If you are an employee in a public health service or public hospital you are usually covered by the government’s professional indemnity arrangements.

For those practitioners employed in private practices sometimes you are covered as part of your employers private practice insurance arrangements, but you will need to check with your employer about this.

You can arrange your own cover directly with insurance providers or you can gain professional indemnity issuance coverage as a benefit of some membership organisations.

Your options include:

• professional associations (e.g. ASMIRT, ANZSNM, ASA, ASUM etc)
• industrial unions and organisations (e.g. Victorian Allied Health Professionals Association, HSU etc)
• insurance providers (e.g. Guild, AON, Vero etc)