The inexpensive way to manage the risk of health-care volunteer injuries

You depend on volunteers who devote their time, energy and skill to support your operations. They’re there for you. But if a volunteer is injured on his or her assignment (or traveling between home and the place of the assignment), are you there for them?

Even in the best-run healthcare facility, volunteers can be injured. We know; we have seen the claims over the past four-plus decades our Volunteers Insurance Service program has existed. Volunteers know they have risks, including risk of injury.

Our accident medical policy provides up to $50,000 for treatment of a volunteer’s injuries. If the volunteer has other insurance, ours is in excess of that, but it reimburses copayments and deductibles. If  the volunteer has no other coverage, ours becomes primary. All you need to do is report the injury to us, and we take it from there.

What would it be worth, to offer a benefit like that? The cost is $4.40  per volunteer per year – less than the price of lunch. So if you have, for example, 100 volunteers, the total premium to cover them all would be $440 for a full year of protection. With our membership and administration fee of $140, the total cost to insure them is $580.  Not a lot, considering the benefit for them and perhaps the help it would give you in recruiting and retaining the best volunteers.

Also, it is not a lot at all, compared to the cost of including volunteers on your workers’ compensation policy – if that is even an option in your state.

Here is a link to our online application on the Website of The CIMA Companies, the administrator of our volunteer insurance program — https://www.cimaworld.com/form/vis-volunteers-insurance-service. Your exact cost is computed automatically for you on the application, so you have that information without even talking with anyone here. But if you do want to talk to a real person about the program before you make a decision, Jennifer Yarnell would love to hear from you. She is at 800.222.8920.

By the way, in addition to accident insurance, we also offer volunteer liability coverage in case volunteers accidentally injure someone or damage someone’s property, and excess auto liability coverage in case volunteers cause an accident while driving their personal vehicles as part of their assignments.  If you depend on volunteer drivers in your patient discharge program, the excess auto liability coverage can prevent them from having an underinsured claim on their personal auto insurance policies – another recruitment edge for you.

All the information is at http://www.cimaworld.com/nonprofits/cima-volunteers-insurance.