Marianne Gutierrez: Health Practitioner: Professional Indemnity Insurance for Alternative Practitioners from a Christian perspective.

Professional Indemnity Insurance for Alternative Practitioners from a Christian perspective. · 20 January 2006

To practice an alternative therapy, one should have Professional Indemnity Insurance.

Most alternative therapies also now have their own professional bodies although this is one professional body to cover all the varying therapies. This is a separate organisation not affiliated to the Insurers, who can give advice, back up, and courses and conduct meetings for the individual therapists to meet and discuss issues with each other so that their qualifications are continually updated and maintained.

There is a cost to belong to a professional organisation as well as the cost for insurance.

At some point in the future, the government has intimated that they will require all alternative therapies to be registered or governed in some way. This is one reason why there are professional bodies, to keep a record of the therapist for when the government legislation comes into being. One of the criteria for the government is that all therapists should do Continual Professional Development of at least 15 hours a year. This can be made up of courses, workshops or the professional body meetings. If there is no record of a therapist then that therapist may find it difficult to gain insurance in the future.

At the professional body meetings, the therapists generally listen to a speaker on a particular therapy.

I have a problem with this. I have a problem with listening to speakers telling me about their therapy that has no basis in science, so I don’t want to attend the meetings. If I don’t attend, I don’t gain my CPD credits, and if I don’t gain CPD credits I may not gain insurance for the following year.

I think that there should be a distinct line between science-based therapies and spiritual therapies and I think the Professional bodies and their meetings should reflect this. There are two advantages to this, the first would be to the practitioners, who could concentrate their CPD credits to workshops and meetings more conducive to their own field of work and secondly the advantage would be to the patient who would be able to see the differences to all these therapies.

I have been working as a volunteer at a Day Centre for cancer patients. There are a variety of therapists working there. The patients are allocated a therapist to work on them and the therapist will then go and ask the patient if they want a treatment. They do have the option to say ‘No’. However the majority of the patients wouldn’t know what treatment they are being given is except that it is nice. They may not be aware of the effects of the treatment or what is happening to them. I do explain my therapy and treatment plan but not all therapies are explained. For this reason I think that the Alternative Medicine world demands definition and a distinction made between science and spiritual.

As to myself, I don’t want to attend meetings anymore where I have to listen to therapies that to me must be spiritual. So what do I do about my CPD credits?

At the moment it is not legal to belong to a Professional body, so I can still practice with only the Insurance. However when it does become a legal requirement, I may not get insured in the future as no professional body will have a record of me.

I would love comments from anyone who may be in the same predicament as me

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