The decision whether to maintain your indemnity coverage would be an individual decision that you would have to make based on your circumstances. Some items to consider would include the following:

• The requirements of Good Medical Practice relating to indemnity remain in place: it is a physician or surgeon’s responsibility to make sure that they “have adequate insurance or indemnity cover”. This would include the need for any extended reporting coverage (commonly referred to as ‘run-off’ or ‘tail’ coverage) should you cancel a policy that provides coverage on a claims-made basis.
• As the NHS Clinical Negligence schemes may not cover certain types of regulatory action, it is important to maintain a policy that provides coverage for actions arising from your NHS or private practice. Your PMP policy provides this protection, covering actions against an Insured physician or surgeon due to GMC Inquiry, Fatal Accident Inquiry and/or Coroner’s Inquest, amongst others.
• If you continue any private Professional Services such as patient follow-up care, consultations and prescription writing, you should maintain indemnity coverage which includes cover for any claims of negligence arising from those Professional Services.

In order to help us review your situation, please contact us as soon as possible so that we can provide your information to our Underwriters for their review. In these exceptional times, our Underwriters have indicated that they intend to be as flexible as possible with respect to providing coverage and support to our Insured physicians and surgeons.

Yes, if you carry out telephone or video consultations due to COVID-19, you will be covered so long as the medical treatment provided is rendered from the UK to your UK patients. However, starting a new practice or business (with a new patient base) will require additional information and will be subject to underwriting review, so please contact us to discuss your specific situation so we can provide assistance.

Please contact us by email on info@premiummedicalprotection.com or telephone on 03451630053 to receive assistance.

If your query is about a medico-legal issue, please contact Clyde & Co on the helpline number provided to you on your PMP customer card.

PMP policies are underwritten by Berkshire Hathaway International Insurance Ltd, part of the Berkshire Hathaway Group of companies. BHIIL has a financial strength rating of AA+ (Standard & Poors, 2019), meaning its ability to meet its’ financial obligations is very strong. Consequently, if claims are made against you now or in the future due to COVID-19, you can be confident BHIIL will be there to assist.

We are committed to the health and wellbeing of our employees and their families. We have taken steps in each office location to protect our staff and reduce the potential for the spread of the virus. We’ve successfully transitioned our team to work from home, with all the necessary resources to continue to provide you with the same high level of service you’ve come to expect from PMP.

We recommend developing a consistent approach to documentation that includes an explanation such as ‘In response to the COVID-19 pandemic…’, and further describes clinical decision-making, actions, variations in care and/or any follow-up treatment.

We are maintaining a series of links to COVID-19 risk resources from authoritative organisations on our COVID-19 Risk Resources page.