When Nurses Make Mistakes

In the medical profession nowadays, it is more important than ever to take care to avoid mistakes. Nursing errors do not just cost money or interrupt business; they cost lives. All good medical professionals know this. However, sometimes mistakes can happen despite the nurse’s best intentions, leading patients to sue for medical misadventure. Other times, claims are simply made by money-hungry patients or their family members. The value of these claims can be extraordinarily high — too high for a nurse to handle by him or herself. That is where professional indemnity insurance for nurses comes in.

Medical indemnity insurance protects nurses against claims of negligence, board investigations and inquiries, formal complaints dealing with non-medical aspects of the business, and more. There are many different levels of indemnity insurance, so it is important to shop around and ensure that the needs of a particular nurse or practice are met by the insurance policy that is finally purchased. Having too little insurance can be just as disastrous as paying for too much. 

Medical indemnity insurance needs to be carried for a certain length of time even after the nurse has retired from practice. This is due to the fact that indemnity insurance is occurrence-based; that is, coverage is for when the claim is made, not when the incident under investigation happened. Claims might be made after the practitioner has retired or otherwise left practice, and if there is no current indemnity policy, the responsibility for the value of the claim rests squarely with the nurse.

While all nurses do their best to protect the lives of their patients, it is inevitable that mistakes will happen. Even if they did not, lawsuits are often filed against perfectly innocent medical practitioners. Professional indemnity insurance for nurses protects them against claims of negligence, whether or not those claims are valid. Having coverage for those kinds of situations is a vital part of being a nurse, and thus professional indemnity insurance is something no nurse can afford to be without.