Dental Protection Limited provides corporate indemnity for a number of Dental Body Corporates (DBC) which means that there are more than 2000 dentists, hygienists, and therapists who in turn are working in the corporate environment.
The DPL Family
A DBC, particularly if it is a large organisation, will inevitably have a turn-over of individuals, and the offer of a small reduction on personal membership is often sufficient to encourage joining individuals to move to DPL membership. Subscriptions for the DBCs themselves are reduced, the more of their staff who hold individual membership with ourselves. The reasons for this are identified below.
Claims
Dental Body Corporate membership allows the company itself to be indemnified against potential claims in respect of allegations of negligence, or acts or omissions of the company itself - perhaps a process failure for example. It also acts as a safety-net when individual clinicians who may be the subject of a claim, cannot be identified. More often than not, this refers to clinicians who have moved away and are untraceable or who may have allowed their own personal indemnity arrangements to have lapsed. DBCs have a mandatory requirement to confirm that personal indemnity arrangements are in place at the commencement of each subscription year, but of course during the year individual members can allow their indemnity arrangements to lapse for a number of reasons.
Naturally, not all of the clinicians working in a DBC will wish to take up DPL membership, and should a claim be made against the corporate and / or the individual, DPL may well have dealings with another defence organisation or insurer, resulting in increased costs. It is for that reason that DBCs corporate subscription fee is loaded according to the number of non-DPL staff members.
Regulatory Issues
Prior to July 2005, DBCs were listed as registrants at the General Dental Council in the same way as individuals, and were therefore subject to the same regulatory investigations as dentists, hygienists, and therapists.