professional indemnity insurance

monkey8

I am a health care professional and have been paying professional indemnity insurance for the last 15 years from the same insurer. I have just realised that when i retire if a claim is made a year afterwards, for an event that occured while I was paying insurance I would not be covered as I am not paying insurance at the time of the claim.
This means that i would have to continue paying PII after I retire to remain covered.
Is this a regular practice with insurance companies?
IS it legal?

summertime07

Yes, this is perfectly normal.

Insurance companies provide insurance on either a loss occurring or a claims made basis.

Most PI insurance is done on a claims made basis, which means that the Insurance Company will only cover claims made against you while you have an existing policy with them. So, as you said, a loss could have occurred a year before you retired but claimed for a year after you have retired. If you do not have appropriate insurance in place you will have to pay compensation yourself.

The Insurance Company should put you on run off/tail cover which means that your premium will decrease by a certain portion each year as you become less risky for them. The Insurance will need to be maintained for a period of 6 years until such claims have become statute barred.

littlemac1980

Well, you need to be careful with the 'opinion' offered in the last post.

Unfortunately it would not be possible to be certain after 6 years the ALL claims had become statute barred, as there is the possibility of a cause of action accruing after the normal statutory limitation date (which incidentally isn't 6 years later for personal injuries) in cases of personal injury, where the claimant wasn't aware that they had suffered a significant injury until sometime after the damage occurred.

blueythebear

littlemac1980 wrote: »

Well, you need to be careful with the 'opinion' offered in the last post.

Unfortunately it would not be possible to be certain after 6 years the ALL claims had become statute barred, as there is the possibility of a cause of action accruing after the normal statutory limitation date (which incidentally isn't 6 years later for personal injuries) in cases of personal injury, where the claimant wasn't aware that they had suffered a significant injury until sometime after the damage occurred.

The question must be asked then as to when should the OP allow his PII expire?

A recent case in the SC allowed a med neg case proceed after nearly 40 years where the plaintiff had not been aware that a certain procedure had been performed on her! The High Court dismissed the case on the basis that there had been inordinate delay but the SC overturned the High Court decision.

nuac

P I inurance is full of pit falls.

Talk to an experienced broker and to a solicitor experienced in such matters.

drkpower

monkey8 wrote: »

I have just realised that when i retire if a claim is made a year afterwards, for an event that occured while I was paying insurance I would not be covered as I am not paying insurance at the time of the claim.
This means that i would have to continue paying PII after I retire to remain covered.

Are you sure?

The major provider of private indemnity in Ireland, afaik, has moved substantially to occurence-based cover rather than claims-made cover.

Second, I presume you are talking about cover outside of public Hospital medicine?

RJunior

Talk to your representative body. They probably deal with this kind of issue all the time.