Professional Indemnity Insurance for Homeopaths

As a Homeopath your work begins with collecting detailed information about your clients’ medical history, lifestyle and symptoms, in order to assess their physical condition and ascertain the best treatment for them. This information includes some deeply personal details about factors such as their temperament and personality, lifestyle, eating habits and sleep patterns.

After building a comprehensive profile of a client you devise and prescribe the best treatment and dosage for their unique combination of symptoms and circumstances. At follow up sessions you monitor the impact of the treatment and make adjustments as necessary. Depending on the type of homeopathy you practice you may use a single treatment or a combination of different medicines.

Since you are prescribing medicines there is always a risk that something could go wrong – or that the client could BELIEVE you have made a mistake that has caused them harm. As well as the risk of causing physical damage to a client or making their condition worse, you could also face claims of negligence resulting in financial loss.

Unfortunately, like any other health practitioner, there are many reasons why a client may choose to take legal action against you. They could claim that:

You were negligent in collecting information about their lifestyle and history, resulting in a mistake in your assessment of their physical condition You did not provide the service you advertised (your treatment did not work) Your treatment made their condition worse Your treatment caused them to experience new symptoms You breached their confidentiality by sharing information about them without their permission

A client visited a Homeopath for treatment of a range of symptoms including anxiety, sleeplessness, shortness of breath and hives. The Homeopath spent over an hour interviewing the client and compiling a detailed personal profile before prescribing a treatment.

During the course of the intake interview the client revealed that she had been having an affair and that she was very worried that her spouse, who was also a patient at the practice, would find out.

A few days later the client’s spouse attended the clinic for a treatment and the Homeopath accidentally pulled up his wife’s file on her database instead of his own. Before the Homeopath realised her error he read some of his wife’s notes on the screen, including the information about her affair. The couple ended up separated and the original client decided to sue the Homeopath for breach of confidentiality. Her claim was upheld and the Homeopath was ordered to pay $14,000 in damages for negligence in her duty to protect her client’s privacy.

The compensation payment plus the Homeopath’s legal costs of $13,500 were covered by her professional indemnity insurance. The excess payable on the claim was just $[xxx].