Corporate care providers

Case study

The risk

Historically, our customer was directly insured with an insurance company and did not use the services of a specialist insurance broker.

This restricted their access to the wider insurance market as the insurer only offered their own policies, and was not equipped to conduct regular visits or service the account in any meaningful way. As a result the insurer did not recommend ways in which the cover provided could be amended, upgraded or changed to reflect changes taking place within the customer’s service provision.

We were invited to tender and review their existing cover in 2008. The customer had cover in place against property damage (Limited Business Interruption), Employer’s and Public Liability, Limited Legal Expenses, Motor Fleet and Fidelity Guarantee. However, we identified that a number of essential covers were missing from the insurance programme.

The solution

Our Business Accounts Manager, Richard Hearn, held a number of meetings with the customer to ensure we fully understood their needs and attitudes to risk (that is, how risk averse as an organisation they were).

We offered the following recommendations to ensure that the customer’s programme of cover offered them comprehensive protection:

Change the business description. The existing insurance description did not make any reference to care services. It only referred to housing services. It is essential that an accurate description is provided to underwriters to ensure all activities are insured.
Increase Public Liability limit. The previous limit was £5million which we did not consider adequate and recommended this be increased to £10million.
Add Malpractice Protection. There was no evidence of Malpractice Protection in the customer’s previous programme. We recommended that this was now added with a £5 million limit of indemnity.
Increase Public Liability to include personal liability of residents at the registered homes.
Additional Costs of Working cover. The basis of cover limited payments to Additional Costs of Working that would be incurred in the event of an insured claim. This would not compensate for revenues that may be lost by such an event. We moved this cover to a more appropriate revenue basis of protection.
Add Contractor’s All Risks cover. This was not covered previously and we included this to protect the customer against losses they may incur whilst any of their locations are undergoing refurbishments or extension works.
Lower policy excesses.
Extend Commercial Legal Expenses to include loss of registration and contract disputes.
Add Motor Legal Expenses cover. This would aid with the recovery of uninsured losses following a non fault accident (e.g. policy excess, car hire charges etc.).
Perform a risk management survey at head office level to review Health & Safety, policies and procedures with the option for further specific reviews at home level. This provides an independent audit of policies and procedures; using our specialist knowledge of the care sector we helped to improve the customer’s risk management.
Add cover for computers owned and used by the customer anywhere in the United Kingdom.
Add full theft provision in respect of the registered homes as previously cover only applied in the event of force or violence.

After our appointment as the customer’s specialist insurance broker in April 2008, they accepted our recommendation to move the insurance programme to a new insurance company, and as a result benefited from a wider scope of protection whilst ensuring that essential covers and limits were in place, for no additional cost.

AA4 CARE 109 110 v1.1

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