The pandemic has caused a great many changes, some of which will be with us for a long time. One such change has been the significant increase in waiting times for NHS treatment.

 The Government have announced recently that the private medical sector will be harnessed to contribute to reducing waiting times. We think the implications of this will be far reaching.  The detail of Government thinking is still to emerge; however, we see a broad pattern of work, not just routine “queue jumping” procedures that the large private hospitals (Spire, BUPA) would expect to pick up.

 We anticipate the government, through the NHS will want to allocate blocks of work to medical businesses, not individuals. From what we know of public procurement, they will want a fixed cost per procedure. Equally, we know that medical indemnity costs form the second or third largest cost to a medical business and any business bidding for work will want to be sure about its significant fixed costs as far as it can be. We would expect the NHS to want an indemnity to be provided by the contractor at the business entity level (not the individual Consultant level) and therefore businesses will want to establish and fix those costs. Moreover, our experience is that insurance costs become proportionately less as medical businesses scale up. There are many reasons why a specialty group in a lead hospital might want to offer their services as a group rather than as a number of individuals.

 At MRSL Enterprise, we can offer appropriate advice on entity level indemnity cover, individuals within any particular grouping and equally importantly, individual and aggregate indemnity limits which are especially important when dealing with blocks of cases over prescribed timeframes.