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Despite all the benefits of travel nursing, including the flexibility to explore the nation while earning what’s often above-average nursing salaries, potential downsides include complaints and lawsuits. Travel nurses face unique challenges and risks when they work in unfamiliar hospitals with differing policies and ways of doing things. Professional liability insurance isn’t just an option; it’s a necessity that safeguards your career and financial well-being. Let’s explore why travel nurses need professional liability insurance to protect their futures and uncover the safety net you might not even know you need.
Professional Risks Call for Professional Liability Insurance
While helping others is a core motivation for working in healthcare, the field can be confrontational and litigious at times. According to survey responses in The 2024 Vivian Healthcare Workforce Report, challenging workplace environments have emerged at many healthcare facilities.
Many healthcare providers (HCPs) feel stressed, depressed or are even the victims of workplace violence. Survey respondents indicated that nurses don’t always feel adequately supported by their employers in these situations. Against this backdrop, nurses face the risk of potential legal challenges and a “he said, she said” conflict in the wake of a negative workplace event or patient complaint.
Even if you’re super careful, there’s always a chance that someone might take legal action against you. Moreover, travel nurses can face higher legal risks compared to staff nurses and may not be defended as vigorously by the facility as would a staff nurse.
What Is Professional Liability Insurance for Travel Nurses?
Professional liability insurance covers you if you’re sued for damages, typically by a patient or their family, for something that occurred on the job. These insurance policies are sometimes called medical malpractice insurance, errors and omissions insurance or nursing malpractice insurance.
A good policy covers legal fees and any settlement or loss resulting from a lawsuit. According to a report from the Nurse Services Organization, the average malpractice claim for registered nurses (RNs) and licensed practical/vocational nurses (LPN/LVNs) in 2020 was $210,513, up 4% compared to the previous report issued in 2015. Nursing professional liability insurance policies can also include additional benefits such as compensation for lost wages and defense of your license.
How Insurance Policies Work to Cover Settlements or Losses
Policies offer varying levels of coverage and work in different ways to cover a claim against you. For example, you usually have a “limit of liability” — the total amount the policy covers in a lawsuit.
The insurer could split the policy limit of liability into “aggregate” and “per claims” limits. For example, your policy’s limit of liability could be $250,000 per claim with a $2,000,000 aggregate.
- Aggregate limit: The total amount your insurer covers for all claims made within your insurance period, often 12 months.
- Per claim limit: The total amount your insurance covers for each individual insurance claim during the coverage period.
There are also restrictions on when you receive coverage for a claim. Your policy may be “occurrence” or “claims-made” based.
- Occurrence: You must have had an active insurance policy when you did the work being complained about in the lawsuit. In other words, you had the policy active on the date of the alleged event.
- Claims-made: You must have had active coverage in place both when the incident occurred and later when someone makes a claim. Sometimes, months or years pass before someone makes a claim against you. In that case, a claims-made policy is best only if you plan to maintain continuous coverage, potentially for quite a while after your travel nurse job has finished or even after retirement.
License Protection Coverage
License protection coverage for travel nurses is available in some liability policies and provides added benefits if your license is at risk. This coverage can help with legal fees, disciplinary hearings and other costs associated with defending against complaints or accusations that jeopardize your nursing license. It can also offer income protection if you are temporarily unable to work due to a license suspension or investigation.
This provision typically isn’t included in an employer’s or agency’s coverage. It’s a policy you take out to cover yourself. We cover employer and agency coverage and their limitations below.
6 Specific Risks Travel Nurses Face
Travel nurses enjoy more flexibility, moving from state to state and from one facility to another on temporary assignments. However, constantly moving around brings some unique risks that staff nurses might deal with less often, including the following.
1. Making Mistakes
When assigned to a new hospital or clinic, you need time to learn its policies, staff and layout. But here’s the catch — you rarely get that luxury as a travel nurse. Facilities expect you to hit the ground running and might not give you enough orientation. Being in new surroundings can lead to more mistakes than nurses who are familiar with their environment.
2. Blame Game
If something goes wrong with a patient’s treatment, monitoring or medication, guess who might get blamed? Yep, the “new” nurse. It doesn’t matter how experienced you are; if you’ve only been at the facility for a few weeks, you’re probably still seen as new. Because your co-workers don’t know you well, they might doubt your abilities and point fingers, even if it isn’t fair.
3. Facility Complaints
A healthcare facility might file a complaint against you, especially if you’re not part of their regular staff. If a patient complains to the hospital about you, the facility could file a grievance directly against you to avoid institutional liability. Most staffing agencies provide liability insurance, but you may not know all the details of what it covers. Without proper coverage, you could end up paying your legal costs for a complaint filed against you.
4. Policy Changes
As a travel nurse, keeping up with different hospital policies and state rules can be challenging. If you don’t carefully read each facility’s policies and the state’s Nurse Practice Act, you might do something okay in one place but not in another, leading to legal trouble.
5. Getting License(s) Revoked
Losing your license is a real risk if complaints turn into legal liabilities. If you violate the Nurse Practice Act in a state you’re temporarily working in, the National Council of State Boards of Nursing (NCSBN) could take action against you. Travel nurses often hold multiple licenses; if one board takes action, others might follow. Plus, you can lose your license over non-work-related incidents, too.
6. Out-of-Date Contact Information
Being constantly on the move means you may not always update your mailing address with the nursing board in your home state. If someone files a complaint against you and your contact info is outdated, attorneys might handle things without your knowledge.
RELATED: Travel Nursing FAQ: A Complete Guide
What About Insurance Coverage Through the Facility or Agency?
Although a healthcare facility is responsible for everything that occurs inside its walls, it doesn’t mean travel nurses enjoy the same coverage under the facility’s liability insurance as staff nurses since they’re technically not employees. Generally, travel nurses have coverage under their staffing agency’s policy because they’re employees of the travel staffing agency, not the healthcare facility. The healthcare facility may even require the agency to provide coverage and/or the travel nurses to have their own policies.
If a facility does cover a travel nurse during a lawsuit, it may then sue the nurse to recoup legal fees. Or a facility’s coverage may have limits, leaving the travel nurse on the hook for losses above that limit. In the worst possible case, you and your facility may find yourselves on opposite sides in a dispute, and the employer’s insurance policyholder is the facility, not you.
Insurance coverage provided by your agency also has its limitations. For one, coverage isn’t guaranteed, so make sure you ask your agency and read the policy to see what’s covered precisely. Next, remember that the insurance policies themselves have limits. If you’re sharing this limit with multiple travel nurses assigned to the facility, there might not be enough to cover a complaint brought against you when the time comes.
Meanwhile, beyond what your agency insurance may cover, a personal insurance policy can cover loss of income, pay your individual legal fees or include loss of license coverage. For all these reasons, nurses need professional liability insurance of their own.
Having Nursing Professional Liability Insurance Is an Industry Best Practice
Ultimately, the decision to purchase license protection coverage depends on individual circumstances, including the perceived level of risk, financial situation and availability of employer-provided legal support. Notably, the American Nurses Association recommends that all nurses, not just travel nurses, carry professional liability insurance.
Consider talking to your nurse mentor or other colleagues to better understand why travel nurses need liability insurance and to learn how to obtain coverage.
Before you start looking for the perfect professional liability insurance for travel nurses, find the perfect travel nurse job. Download the Vivian app and get everything you need for your job hunt right at your fingertips.
