Employment

How Understanding Medical Indemnity Can Make You a Better Insurance Salesperson

When you understand the details, concept, and functionality of an idea, you can explain it to anyone. As a professional in the insurance industry, you likely spend a lot of time explaining the pros and cons to leads. As most people totally understand what car insurance is, you more than likely don’t have to take the time out of your day to explain how it works.

However, there are other forms of insurance that are lesser known. Having a firm grasp of what medical indemnity is will enable you to better educate clients, leading to more sales.

Getting The Concept of Medical Indemnity Across

There are all kinds of insurance products for medical professionals and they generally serve a similar purpose – to mitigate liability risk. With medical indemnity, a medical practice can be well insulated from the risk of being accused of negligence. Remember that accusations of medical negligence are often a case of opinion rather than law.

A skilled surgeon could be accused of negligence as a result of joking around about not having enough coffee before he operated. When you understand how medical indemnity insurance works, you can explain the concept to potential customers a whole lot easier.

Explaining the Statistics

Every year, thousands of medical negligence cases are filed in the UK. Whilst some medical professionals are at a higher risk of being accused of negligence, there is no part of medicine which is immune.

For example, a cosmetic surgery clinic might be at more of a risk of being sued for medical negligence because of the nature of the business, but even a podiatrist would benefit from medical indemnity coverage.

To drive this point home, it is vital that you as an insurance professional can cite relevant statistics. Compared to the US, medical professionals in the UK are far more likely to be sued than those across the pond. When considering population, this is a very eye-opening statistic.

Highlighting Real Life Examples

There is a difference between being a realist and a pessimist. All you need to do is turn on the news and jot down the details of new cases surrounding doctors and surgeons being sued for negligence in order to come up with real-life examples you can cite. The reality is that medical professionals are being sued at record levels.

There are countless legal cases involving the NHS, patients, and solicitors that show how expensive it can be for a medical professional to defend him or herself in court. These real-life examples are examples of what can happen to unsuspecting doctors, whether they have medical indemnity or not.

Reiterating the Need for Protection

It is a proven fact that medical professionals have a need for insurance products to prevent them from going under because of mere accusations. Even in cases when doctors are proven to be negligent, that isn’t absolute grounds for them to go out of business.

Reiterate as much as you can that doctors have a need to protect themselves. They must advocate for reform as much as they should step up and ensure that they have strong protections in place.

If you want to be able to consistently make a case for why medical indemnity is necessary for all medical professionals, first you have to understand it fully yourself. Be able to explain why it is critical and how it actually protects doctors and others in the medical field in the long run.

Very few medical professionals are going to want to pay for any kind of insurance that they don’t believe there is an actual need for. So, be prepared to stick strictly to the facts, show how medical indemnity protects doctors, and summarise what it can do for their practices.

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