If you’re a Doctor, Do you Need to Get Malpractice Insurance?

If you’re a Doctor, do you Need to get Malpractice Insurance?

Malpractice insurance/Professional Indemnity Insurance is an insurance cover for doctors in the event of being sued for medical negligence. Like a health insurance or life insurance, its purpose is to mitigate risk.

Here are 3 reasons I’ve had clients who were facing malpractice lawsuits, give for not having had professional indemnity insurance.

News Flash: NONE of them are reason enough to not have malpractice insurance.

[1] ‘I started out on my own recently and only have few patients.’

Or ‘I’ll take it when I have lot of patients.’

All it takes is one patient to sue you, so the number of patients you are seeing does not matter.

I’ll ask you a question here, when are you more likely to make mistakes- When you are young and inexperienced or when you are older and experienced?

[2] ‘I work in a government hospital/ rural set up, most of my patients are not affluent/ not well educated, so they are unlikely to sue me.’

Absolutely false. Anyone, from any section of society can sue you.

Another Question I’ll put to you, who do you think is more likely to sue you- someone who really needs the money or someone who doesn’t need the money as much?

[3] ‘I don’t do any surgeries, nor deal with very sick patients, so I can’t get sued.’

Again, a wrong assumption. You can be sued even for patients you’ve only seen in the OPD, and no one can guarantee that complications will not occur even if dealing with apparently simple conditions.

If you are a doctor who is giving professional opinions in your own capacity, it is recommendable to have Professional Indemnity Insurance/Malpractice Insurance.

If you don’t have malpractice insurance, it isn’t too late yet. Share this with other doctors as well so that you and your friends don’t have to pay the price, literally.

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This post is not sponsored, neither am I promoting any particular insurance provider. It is only an attempt at trying to help doctors avoid mistakes that I’ve witnessed some clients regret after it was too late.

#doctors #indiandoctors #medicalnegligence #medicolegal #medlegal #medicallaw #malpractice #malpracticeinsurance