Locum Insurance

Locum insurance is designed to cover you against the increased cost of working as a result of a staff absence. A claim can cover you for the costs of aspects such as calling in a locum and providing sickness pay. Locum insurance is designed to cover a range of different medical practices, including GPs, vets, dentists and opticians as well as pharmacists, chiropractors and osteopaths.

Locum insurance policies cover a range of different absence types, from illness and jury service to personal accident and bereavement. It is possible to extend policies to cover stress-related absences and maternity cover. The majority of staff absences are unavoidable and protecting your practice and your patients is key to your business. By covering a range of different types of absence you can continue striving to meet your duty of care.

When choosing your policy it is important that you consider how your practice copes with staff absence. It is possible to tailor your policy to suit your needs and contingency plans, so whether you would rather have cover from the first day of absence or feel that you could cope for two weeks with an absence, you can choose the deferment period to suit you. Typically, the higher your excess/deferment period is, the cheaper your premium is likely to be, so we would always advise you to think about how locum insurance fits within your contingency plans and budget.

Whilst the vast majority of absences are entirely unavoidable, there are a number of stress-related absences every year which could potentially be reduced or even prevented by taking steps to help limit work-related stress. Ensuring that working conditions are good and the practice is inclusive and supportive may help to reduce absences due to work-related stress.

Yes, all of our locum policies come with access to a Health and Wellbeing programme available for all insured members of staff to use. Towergate Health Assist will help you with your duty of care to your colleagues and will help reduce long and short-term absence. All of the services provided by Health Assist are completely confidential.

In partnership with Health Assist, we offer all of our customers access to the health and wellbeing My Healthy Advantage app, which provides an enhanced set of wellbeing tools and engaging features to support and improve the user’s mental and physical health by using personal metrics to set goals and achievements. These include:

• Personalisation – specify preferences and topic to populate a personalised newsfeed with tailored resources and learning materials based on the user’s interests, such as exercises.
• Contact made easy – live chat available via the app, email, call back request, and a direct link to the helpline.
• Weekly mood tracker – tracks moods on a weekly basis in relation to financial, physical, and general wellbeing, and push notifications to remind people to input how they are feeling.
• Review graphs displaying the last five weeks trends, and users are prompted to reflect.
• Four-week plans – support with quitting smoking, losing weight and coping with pressure.
• Mini health checks – covers topics such as height and weight, sleep and mental health.
• Access to Health Assist confidentiality via phone, request a call back or live chat to speak directly with their team.

The My Healthy Advantage app also includes Bright TV, a series of episodes from well-known faces, including Dame Kelly Holmes, Ruby Wax and Andy Reid MBE discussing their lives, struggles and unique experiences. Each month, a new episode is available free on the app, so you can sit back, relax and listen to inspiring and informative discussions.

Our policy provides 24/7 cover worldwide covering a wide range of activities.

Our locum insurance policy provides 'cover assurance' which means we guarantee you a renewal regardless of your claim history or situation.

Yes, we are very happy to support a partial return to work. For example, if a GP undergoes surgery and could only return for two sessions per week, instead of 6 sessions, the policy allows you to claim for the 4 sessions that need to be covered.

Yes, as care industry experts we can also provide cover for vets, pharmacies, dentists, pharmacists, osteopaths and opticians for practice overheads and more.

Also known as an excess period, this is the period of time after which you will start receiving money from a claim under your insurance policy. For example, a 4 week excess period means you have chosen for your staff to be absent for 4 weeks before you are eligible. We offer flexible excess periods to tailor your cover to your own needs with anything from 1 week to 13 weeks, or 26 weeks. The longer the excess period you choose, the lower your premium will be.

If you would prefer to spread the cost of your RIB insurance policy, you have the option of setting up a Direct Debit to pay your premium bimonthly instalments through our preferred provider, Premium Credit Limited (PCL).

To find out more about PCL and direct debit payments, select Direct Debit.

To understand more about how PCL work together with Towergate, please read our Regulatory Information.