Join A Nurse Association - Nurses Liability Insurance Made More AffordableIf you go through the schooling necessary to become a nurse, you will do everything in your power to keep your license. You're a nurse for life. In order to protect yourself, you will need a good nurses liability insurance policy. Nurses liability insurance protects you, your family and your career. Professional liability coverage through your employer is simply just not enough. Professional liability insurance policy limits may not be high enough to protect you and any co-workers that may be named in a lawsuit. What happens then? You and your family risk having your financial security taken away, and you risk losing the career you worked so hard to obtain. Further, with only professional liability to rely on, you might not be given coverage that covers any lost wages or board hearing reimbursements and attorney and court costs. Without the right coverage, you may not even be covered outside of the workplace as a volunteer or for part-time work. This is where nurses liability insurance comes into play. It protects you from malpractice claims that your company's professional liability coverage won't cover. If you are an RN and work as an independent contractor at a specific hospital or medical center, patients come in all the time requiring minor surgeries. Let's say a patient came in requiring an appendectomy. During the appendectomy, you are the nurse in charge of making sure the sponges are all accounted for. It is a routine surgery and all goes as planned. A couple of months later, the patient returns and requires surgery to remove a section of twisted intestines. The doctor opens him up, discovers a sponge from a previous surgery (the one you were in charge of counting the sponges for), and has to stop because of fear of infection. Because of the impending surgery being postponed, the patient's intestine grows gangrenous, he develops an infection and ultimately dies. Of course, the patient's family sues the medical center for damages. In turn, the medical center will sue you because you were the one in charge of how many sponges went into and out of the body. It is simply not safe enough to rely on your employer's insurance alone. What nurses liability insurance can protect you against is a suit that your employer's insurance company settles that does not necessarily get settled in your favor, only the hospital's or medical facility's. With your own nurses liability insurance, you will have attorneys working on your side for your benefit, not the benefit of the company you work for. You will be their main interest, and in any lawsuit, that is what you want from an attorney. When you become a member of a nurse association, you will be afforded the option to purchase coverage through them at a cheaper cost to you than if you were to purchase nurses liability insurance on your own. |