ABSTRACT
The Medical Protection Society was unable to provide indemnity because it is a mutual society providing discretionary cover and the Osteopath’s Act 1993 requires the General Council ‘to secure that they are properly insured against liabilities to, or in relation to, their patients’. In 2003 the Medical Protection Society, a medical defence organisation providing cover on a discretionary basis, briefly entered the market but withdrew because it could not comply with the requirements of the Osteopaths Act, which requires osteopaths to be insured. Because a claims-made policy looks at when the claim is made, the incident may have occurred before the osteopath was insured. Provided the osteopath was unaware of any potential claim at the time, took the insurance, the policy will respond to any appropriate claim, subject to the terms of the policy, as long as it occurs during the period of insurance.
