Why do you need Holistic Insurance?

Every business needs insurance because every business faces risks and those risks can lead to unexpected losses. It’s easy to be fooled into thinking “it won’t happen to me”, particularly if you’ve never had to make a claim before. But when something goes wrong, you start to realise the value of having an insurance company there to help you get through it. And some types of insurance can actually be a legal requirement, with heavy penalties if you don’t have them when you are required to do so.

Standard business insurance policies are available to protect businesses against these risks. However, if you are a holistic therapy providers, you should consider a holistic insurance policy instead because that will be tailored to the specific needs of your business. Specifically, there are gaps in a standard business insurance policy that will leave holistic therapy practitioners uninsured in certain situations.

There are two main areas where a standard business insurance policy usually doesn’t provide adequate cover for a holistic therapy provider:

• Malpractice insurance
• Financial loss

Liability & malpractice insurance

The liability insurance cover in a standard business insurance policy covers you if a compensation claim is made against you by someone who alleges that something you’ve done, or failed to do, has resulted in them being injured or their property being damaged. It also covers any associated legal fees and other expenses. This is an important cover because liability claims can be expensive to settle. It is not uncommon for a liability claim to end up costing six-figure sums.

The problem with the liability insurance cover in a standard business insurance policy though, is that there is an exclusion of cover for compensation claims arising as a result of professional activities. This is a major cover restriction for holistic therapy providers, because the provision of therapy is deemed to be a professional activity so it would mean that a large proportion of potential claims would not be covered.

Holistic insurance usually contains a malpractice extension. This covers for claims made for bodily injury, mental and psychological damage from both therapies provided and from advice given, or a combination of the two.

Financial loss insurance

Another limitation of the public liability insurance cover in a standard business insurance policy is the fact that a standard business insurance policy will only cover compensation claims involving injuries or property damage. Compensation claims for purely economic losses with no associated injury or property damage are not covered.

Again, this is a major restriction, because not all compensation claims result from someone being injured or having had their property damaged; often the compensation claim arises because they have lost wages or had to cancel a holiday as a result of something that has happened, for example.

Holistic insurance deals with this via a financial loss cover extension. This public liability insurance extension extends the public liability cover so that it covers compensation claims for purely economic losses, as well as compensation claims arising from injuries and property damage.