Professional Indemnity & Run-Off Cover for AHPRA-Registered Practitioners

The Physiotherapy Board's registration standard requires Australian physiotherapists to hold professional indemnity insurance with a minimum cover of $2M per claim and $5M in aggregate per year, for all activities within their scope of practice. The standard also requires automatic reinstatement after a claim, run-off cover on cessation of practice, and cover for civil liability arising from practice. Most physiotherapists in private practice carry between $5M and $20M to reflect realistic claim severity for orthopaedic and rehabilitation work, particularly where manual therapy, dry needling, or device-assisted treatment is provided.

An MDO such as Avant, MIPS, MIGA or MDA National is a member-owned mutual. Surpluses are either returned to members or held against future claims years. MDOs offer 'discretionary' cover, their boards can extend cover beyond strict policy wording in unusual cases, and bundle in dedicated medico-legal support, including AHPRA notification representation, complaints handling, advice lines and coronial inquest assistance. Commercial insurers (Berkley, Vero, Allianz, Guild and others) operate strict-contract cover: claims are paid only if they fit policy wording, with no discretionary extension. Commercial cover is often cheaper for low-frequency, low-severity professions (psychology, physiotherapy, OT, podiatry) where the MDO medico-legal infrastructure is less critical. Doctors, dentists and higher-risk procedural practitioners generally use an MDO.

Run-off cover is PII that continues to respond to claims made after you have ceased active practice, for example, after retirement, career change, extended parental leave, or moving overseas. Because almost all AU health PII is written on a claims-made basis, the policy in force at the date the claim is notified is the one that responds. If you stop paying premiums and a patient brings a claim three years later, there is no live policy and no cover. Run-off bridges that gap. Most MDOs provide free run-off on full retirement at 65 or older (often 7 to 10 years), free run-off for life on death or permanent disability, and paid run-off for early retirement, career change or career break, typically priced at 50% to 100% of the last annual premium per year of cover. Seven years is the practical minimum; longer for practitioners who treated children.

Not automatically. The retroactive date on your first post-graduate policy controls how far back the cover reaches, and many policies default to the policy's first day. That means an incident from your intern year or final-year clinical placement may fall outside cover if a claim arrives once you are in practice. The fix is to ask the insurer for a retroactive date backdated to the start of clinical placements. Several MDOs (Avant, MIPS in particular) provide free or heavily discounted new-graduate cover with a retroactive date that extends back across the training period, confirm this in writing before signing your first policy. If you trained or did placements overseas, declare those separately.

Generally yes, provided telehealth is declared and the patient is located in Australia at the time of the consultation. The treating practitioner must hold AHPRA registration and practise within scope. Telehealth to patients located outside Australia is usually excluded unless specifically endorsed, this includes consultations to AU citizens while they are temporarily overseas. After the COVID-19 expansion of telehealth, most MDOs have settled telehealth into their standard policies, but specific products (asynchronous text-based care, AI-assisted triage, app-based prescribing) may still need additional endorsement. If your practice model has evolved since your last renewal, update your insurer.

No. Under the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law and each Board's registration standard, professional indemnity insurance arrangements that meet the Board's standard must be in place for all practice, including a single consultation. A gap of even one day exposes you to two distinct risks: any incident occurring in the gap has no insurer to respond, and any claim made in the gap also has no responding insurer because AU PII is claims-made. Registrants who practise without PII are in breach of their registration standard and can face disciplinary action up to and including suspension or cancellation of registration. Always overlap policies, not gap them.