Optician locum insurance is not cheap. When you desperately need a locum optometrist for your practice in the UK you are looking at around £300 a day, so that’s £2,500 for a locum for a fortnight.
The problem with requiring locums is that, apart from pre-booked times such as holidays, you really have no idea when you would otherwise need one or for that matter for how long you would need one. If somebody in your practice goes sick, it might be for a short while, or it could be for weeks.
Furthermore, you may have an optometrist hand in their notice. Fair enough, you probably have four weeks to find a replacement, but here’s the problem. According to the job vacancy website Indeed, it was found in 2019 that the position of an optometrist is the most difficult to fill in the UK. Nearly 69% of the vacancies for optometrists that were posted on its’ website stayed vacant for two months or more.
That does not bode well for you if you have to hire a locum for all that time. Not only that, but when you do hire a replacement optometrist, he or she will doubtless have to give four weeks’ notice to their current employer, so you could easily be looking at having a locum for three months or even longer. And at £300 a day that’s over £16,000 or possibly even more.
All of our locum insurance policies at Approachable Locum Insurance are tailored to your precise requirements because no two optician practices are exactly the same. They can cover accident or illness anywhere in the world, jury service, and delayed return from holiday, which is most important with all these ever-changing green, amber, and red list countries that mean a 10-day quarantine when there was no quarantine required for that country when the individual went on holiday.
The policies can also cover you for compassionate leave, suspension, funeral expenses, paternity leave, medical and hospital expenses, revalidation, and personal effects, so you can pick and choose which cover you need.
All of the policies that we provide are underwritten by Lloyds of London, and they only contain a 12-month pre-condition clause. What that means is that you cannot be covered for a condition that has arisen in the last 12 months. By comparison, most other optician locum insurance policies of this type contain a 24-month or even 36-month pre-condition clause.
Furthermore, our policies also contain a continuation guarantee. What that means for you is that once your optometrists have been accepted for cover, the policy cannot be cancelled, or restricted, or declined when it comes to renewal time on the basis of claims that you have made, or variations in the condition of one of the insured.
Your policy also pays out for a full 52 weeks. Most other policies do not do this. So, if you have a deferral period of, say, four weeks, the policy would payout up to week 56 compared with others which would only payout for 48 weeks up to week 52. Furthermore, your policy has no “admin” fees or broker charges that come with other policies.
Buying locum insurance for opticians can be difficult, as there are so many parts to the policy. You need to make sure that you are covered for everything that you need cover for, and at the same time not paying for cover that you don’t require. One of our expert team members will be happy to talk you through all the different cover that is available and steer you in the right direction for your individual needs.
