Does Pharmacy Insurance Include Professional Indemnity?

When you get pharmacy insurance, you’ll need to get used to terms and ideas you won’t find in any other area of insurance. But will your policy cover professional indemnity?

No, not as standard. You will need to contact your insurance provider in order to have professional indemnity insurance added onto your pharmacy insurance policy. It is illegal to operate without it.

Professional indemnity is vital insurance to have when you operate a pharmacy. It covers you for losses suffered by customers as a consequence of a pharmacist’s professional neglect, error or omission.

In this article, we’ll cover the following questions:

● What is professional indemnity insurance?

● What is products liability for?

● Does professional indemnity cover legal expenses?

Running a pharmacy comes with extra obligations to your customers, as you are dispensing important medication that will affect their health. You need to be insured for all risks involved.

What is professional indemnity insurance?

If you accidently dispense the wrong medication or the wrong dose and a customer takes an action against you, your professional indemnity policy will take over the defense of the case as well as any compensation awarded to your customer.

If you have a standard pharmacy insurance policy, it will not cover professional indemnity as standard. In fact, most retail policies specifically exclude dispensing risk. Having a separate professional indemnity policy plugs up this gap and makes sure you’re operating safely.

It is a requirement that you have professional indemnity cover in place when you run a pharmacy. If you do not have the right insurance, and you’re caught dispensing medication, you could lose your business and a lot more.

Professional Indemnity Insurance is probably the most important insurance policy pharmacists can have. You need to make sure your policy includes all unintended breaches of professional duty including giving advice, failure to give advice and dispensing errors.

What is products liability for?

Unlike professional indemnity, products cover will protect you against claims made by somebody who is injured, made ill, or has their property damaged by a product that is sold by your pharmacy.

When someone is hurt and claims against the products section of your policy, those claims may be referred back to the manufacturer – but having this kind of insurance means all that is taken care of, as well as all the associated legal costs. Cover under this section includes your defence costs as well as compensation for the injured party.

If the manufacturer cannot be traced – for example, if the product was manufactured outside the European Union, this means that the pharmacy would be liable. You are responsible for selling safe products to the public.

If you, the pharmacy has repackaged or rebranded the product, or stored the product incorrectly, then you are covered under this section of the policy.

Does professional indemnity cover legal expenses?

Yes. All of your legal expenses are covered as part of the professional indemnity section of your policy.

A pharmacist who is providing advice owes a duty of care to their customers. The standard of duty of care is the provision of “reasonable skill and care”. If a pharmacist falls below this standard and causes a loss, they may be viewed as being negligent. This means they may be held liable for any subsequent losses incurred.

All of this can get very expensive. Professional indemnity insurance absolutely is a must, because if a claim is brought against you it’s very easy to lose your business trying to pay all the costs associated with a court case.

You can also get extra legal expenses cover, which will protect you for legal costs as a result of an action brought against you by an individual or institution which is not covered by your professional indemnity insurance. An example would be an unfair dismissal claim or appeal against a suspension by a statutory body. These could be considered ‘business’ as opposed to professional risks.

If you need any help or have any questions regarding your pharmacy insurance and the different types of policy involved, call us today and talk to our experts!