Not all professional liability insurance is created equally. Reading the following information may be the most important thing that you read this year – what kind of insurance do you have if you’re not with CMMOTA?
We often receive enquiries about CMMOTA’s Professional Liability Insurance, so we wanted to provide you as members with some immensely helpful information, to keep you informed, so that in turn you can inform others if they ask.
The current CMMOTA insurance program gives its members both OCCURRENCE BASED Commercial General Liability (CGL) and OCCURRENCE BASED Malpractice liability coverage.
Commercial General Liability covers property damage or injury to others that may occur while on or around your business premises when you are not directly providing RMT or MOT services to them (for example a client breaks their leg tripping on a loose piece of carpet entering your office). Malpractice Liability provides coverage for injury that directly results from your treatment or failure to provide the correct treatment to the client (ie. you injure a client due to improper treatment).
Occurrence based coverage means insurance would respond to an injury claim that was brought forward, even if it was months or years after the treatment that caused the injury was given, even if the policy has been cancelled.
With a Claims Made based policy, the claim has to be brought forward while the policy is active. As soon as a Claims Made policy goes inactive for any reason, it voids coverage for all past claims. While there are ways to extend the reporting period for Claims Made there is often a cost and a time limit of only a few years for these extensions.
So, for example, for someone going on maternity leave it would NOT be advisable for them to temporarily cancel a Claims Made Based policy as doing so could result in a denial of an injury claim from a past treatment. This would leave the member responsible for paying their own defense costs and any judgments against them. Even in cases where it is unlikely that there will be any judgement against the practitioner, the defense costs can be considerable. This same scenario with the CMMOTA Occurrence Based program poses no such issues as long as it can be shown a policy was in place when the treatment occurred that caused the injury.
