Professional Indemnity Insurance for Nurses

If you wish to practice as an Enrolled Nurse, a Registered Nurse or a Nursing Practitioner in Australia you must be registered with the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia (NMBA). It is a legal requirement of registration (under the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law) that you have ‘adequate’ professional indemnity insurance in place, and you will need to provide evidence of your cover in order to register. The rules and requirements are set out in the NMBA’s Registration Standard on professional indemnity insurance. The standard requires that you have professional indemnity insurance in place ‘which covers the full scope’ of your practice. It recommends that you consider including civil liability cover, unlimited retroactive cover and run-off cover, and acknowledges that ‘nurses and midwives in different types of practice will require different levels of PII cover, according to their particular level of risk’. This puts the responsibility on you to ensure that your cover is adequate for your circumstances. If you are self-employed as a Nurse or Midwife, run off cover is a legal requirement. If patients are unhappy with the care you have given them they may seek to take legal action against you, even if there is no justification for this. Your professional indemnity insurance will also cover your legal costs if you need to mount a defence against an unfounded claim. This is crucial to protecting your professional reputation.

A self-employed Nurse working on contract in a private hospital was working her way through the ward administering prescribed medications when one of the patients went into cardiac arrest. In rushing to attend the emergency the Nurse failed to record the anticoagulation medication she had just administered on a patient’s records, and she did not remember to come back later and complete the entry. Shortly afterwards her shift ended and the new Nurse on duty, finding nothing in the notes, administered a second dose of the medication.

The patient suffered a severe intracranial hemorrhage as a result of the anticoagulant overdose, which caused permanent brain damage. The patient’s family took legal action against the hospital and against the Nurse personally for her negligence in failing to record the initial dose of the medication on the patient’s chart. The claim was upheld and damages of $1,200,000 were awarded to the patient.

In addition to the compensation payment the Nurse incurred $43,000 in legal costs in defending the claim. Both the legal costs and the damages were covered by her professional indemnity insurance and she paid an excess of just $[xx] on the claim.