How does Company Protection differ from individual membership?
About Company Protection
- A dental company or corporate entity can be legally liable for the actions of its employees, or contractors.
- Company Protection provides access to discretionary indemnity for clinical negligence claims made against the corporate legal entity, as opposed to individual clinicians or directors. It is a separate membership agreement to the individual membership a Practice Principal may hold with Dental Protection.
- Company Protection is provided on a claims-made basis. You can find out more about claims-made protection in the next section.
- It is a condition of Company Protection membership that all registered dental practitioners employed or engaged by the organisation have and maintain their own individual professional indemnity arrangements.
- Company Protection will not usually provide indemnity to the organisation if a case or claim is made against any individual dental practitioner – even where the organisation is legally liable for that act or omission – unless explicitly agreed otherwise. The individual in question should contact their own indemnifier to request support.
- However, if the employee or contractor is or was a Dental Protection member but unable to instruct us in person, it is common practice for Dental Protection to use its discretion to assist the company or entity with a resulting claim.
About claims-made indemnity
Dental Protection membership for individual dentists is provided on an occurrence-basis. This means individuals are protected against claims arising from incidents that occurred during the period of membership, no matter when they are reported – even if it’s years after membership has ended for any reason.
Company Protection is different; it’s provided on a claims-made basis. With claims-made indemnity, the company is protected for incidents that both occur and are reported whilst the membership is in continuous force. That means the subscription must be paid for both at the time of the adverse incident and when it is reported without there being a break in protection.
This also means that if a company chooses to cancel their claims-made membership with Company Protection, they will need to purchase retroactive protection (sometimes called ‘run-off cover’) from the new provider.
Need protection for historical incidents that occurred before joining?
Company Protection claims-made membership can be instated retroactively, providing greater flexibility and peace of mind. One of the reasons that this claims-made protection is considered the most suitable for companies and corporate entities, is that support can be requested for incidents that occurred before the start of the membership, so long as the membership has a retroactive start date. This date can be requested upon application.
No exclusionary clauses or excesses to pay
Unlike individual occurrence-based indemnity (which has no financial caps or limits), Company Protection has a generous claims indemnity limit of £1m in the aggregate, with no excess.
Like our individual membership for dentists, Company Protection is provided on a discretionary basis, meaning we can offer assistance in a wide range of circumstances, using our judgement, experience and insight to help members.
Incident reporting
Under the terms of their membership with Dental Protection, all members have a duty to notify Dental Protection of matters, including regulatory and disciplinary matters, which they feel may lead them to seek assistance from the mutual fund without delay.
This is particularly important where you have a claims-made membership in which case, the following specific Claims-Made Reporting Obligations apply:
You must tell us about any incident, event or circumstance that could reasonably give rise to you seeking indemnity with a claim for compensation, as soon as is reasonably practicable after you become aware of them.
Anonymising any patient information where possible, the Corporate Officer should email the following information to [email protected]
- What has happened? Please provide a summary
- Key dates: When did the incident happen? When did you find out about it?
- Who was involved? Which Corporate roles?
- Was any of the care involved provided by a dentist? If yes, provide the names and positions of those dentist(s)
- Copies of any complaint and any response to a complaint
Contact us
For Company Protection membership queries, call us on 0800 046 9704