If you are like most of our USA-based instructors, you obtain your professional liability insurance through DAN’s Risk Management Group. This means you’ve either received or are about to receive an email reminding you that your insurance is about to expire in the next 30 days. This is thanks to the 90-day extension DAN granted all of its policyholders.
A question that has come up is, when you renew, will your premium cover an entire year, or will that 90-day extension be counted against it? We posed this question to Rochelle Wright, manager of DAN’s Professional Programs.
Rochelle confirmed that the 90-day extension was, in fact, nearly three months of additional coverage at no charge. So, when you renew, it will be for a full year from the day your current coverage expires — provided you renew before that day arrives.
Ensuring coverage for the NSS-CDS
Were a student to be killed or injured in or as a result of an NSS-CDS course, the plaintiff’s attorneys would sue more than just the instructor. It is a common practice for them to sue anybody even remotely connected with the case if they feel they have a chance of collecting. This list includes dive boats, dive shops, equipment manufacturers and, yes, training agencies.
This is why we require our instructors who either teach in the USA or teach USA citizens or residents to not only carry professional liability but list the NSS-CDS as an additional insured. It is the only way the Section can be covered for their actions.
At one time, most insurance carriers said that dive stores, dive sites and training agencies were automatically covered as additional insured. Sadly, those days have long passed.
- One carrier, who used to be a major player in liability insurance for dive professionals, has made it next to impossible for a training agency to be named as an additional insured. Given their policies cost noticeably more than most, this has become a non-issue. Only one of our instructors still insures with them,.
- Another carrier, who used to provide instructors with a certificate listing all their additional insureds no longer does so. As we understand it, instructors can still submit a list of entities they want as additional insureds. But getting a certificate attesting to this fact is next to impossible. This leaves it unclear whether an organization such as the NSS-CDS is insured or not.
The one bright star on the horizon here is Divers Alert Network. DAN not only makes it possible to list the NSS-CDS as an additional insured, they make doing so absurdly easy.
- When you renew your DAN professional liability insurance online, you will find your application pre-populated with all of your additional insureds from last year. The NSS-CDS should be among them. If it is not, you can easily add it.
- Below the list of additional insureds is a checkbox. Click on it and DAN will automatically send us a certificate listing the NSS-CDS as one of your additional insureds. This will save you from having to do this yourself.
What could be easier?