Insurance for Nurses

Nurses are trained to follow strict workplace safety protocols, and typically wear personal protective equipment (PPE) throughout the day. But nurses also work in high-stress, fast-paced environments, which can ultimately lead to mistakes and miscommunications. Although nurses are highly trained to handle rigorous work environments, even the most stringent safety protocols cannot prevent every accident.

This is why healthcare workers’ compensation is crucial for healthcare businesses. Whether your company is a large hospital or a small medical clinic, you should maintain reliable insurance for nurses.

Insurance for nurses

Nurses may work in a variety of healthcare settings, such as:

• Hospitals
• Medical clinics or urgent care centers
• Nursing homes or assisted living facilities

While most nurses are usually employees of the place they work, sometimes they may work through agencies or as temporary nurses, particularly if they are travel nurses.

Nurses who are full-time employees should be able to rely on the coverage of insurance from their employers, whether it is liability insurance, health insurance, or workers’ compensation insurance.

Liability insurance for nurses is particularly important for those in the medical field. This includes insurance against malpractice lawsuits. If a lawsuit is brought against a particular nurse or healthcare company, typically, the company’s liability insurance will provide coverage for the nurse. If the nurse is working as a contractor, they should provide their own liability insurance policy.

Healthcare workers’ comp is also extremely important. Like liability insurance, workers’ comp insurance for nurses is usually provided for nurses by their employers. Workers’ compensation insurance provides reimbursement to employees in the event of a workplace or work-related fatality, injury, or illness. With so many workplace injuries and illnesses among nurses, workers’ compensation coverage is critical. (In fact, states often mandate that companies provide coverage to their full-time workers.)

Workers’ compensation insurance for nurses typically covers:

• Medical doctor’s bills
• Medicines and treatments
• On-going physical therapy or rehab
• Missed wages

(This coverage only includes costs related to workplace medical issues.) This type of insurance can help ensure that your employee gets the medical treatment they need when they need it. Not only does this help the employee financially, it also helps ensure that they return to work fully recovered. It is neither healthy nor helpful for a nurse to return to work before they are fully recovered from an injury or illness.

Experience modification rates and healthcare workers

Calculating workers’ compensation rates can be tricky and is usually left to insurance companies to calculate. But it can be helpful to understand why your premium and worker compensation rates are the way they are.

Workers’ comp premiums are usually calculated according to a company’s payroll; typically, for every $100 of payroll there is a specific rate, which is determined by classification codes of your employees. This classification code identifies which type of work presents more risk to employees. Thus, that larger companies with more employees and larger payrolls will usually pay larger premiums. (Many hospitals and large healthcare groups fall into this category.) But workers’ comp insurance also takes your industry and history with workplace accidents into account. This is called the experience modification rate.

An experience modification rate, or mod rate, is a number assigned to a company based on its industry classification and past performance regarding workers’ compensation claims.

The industry classification component helps make sure apples-to-apples comparisons are being made when calculating premiums. In other words, similar industries get grouped together to be more fairly compared with one another. For example, a clothing retail company would not be grouped with a healthcare company because workplace injuries and illness incident rates are different.

Individual businesses are also assigned numbers based on the number and severity of claims. For example, a company with one very large workers’ comp claim would be categorized differently from a company with ten very small comp claims.

Because healthcare workers have a high injury/illness rate, the hospital or company’s mod rate may be higher than businesses in lower-risk industries, such as office work. If you have a large healthcare company or hospital, the premium for your workers’ compensation insurance for nurses could be even higher.

This rate is provided to you by your workers’ compensation insurance company, so you should contact the provider of your work compensation policy to see how your business is being classified and what your mod rate is. 

Why CompSource Mutual

CompSource Mutual is here to help you get the Oklahoma workers’ compensation coverage that you need. Plus, we offer our policyholders a library of educational materials on workplace safety. Our consultants can also help you meet your company’s workplace safety goals. Learn more here.