Good practice

Good clinical practice

We expect all practitioners to follow requirements and guidelines relevant to your practice including:

• Good practice guidelines of your registering body, e.g. GMC, GDC, HPC
• Good practice guidelines of your specialty organisation or Royal College
• National Minimum Standards for Private and Voluntary Healthcare

Good financial practice

Though we do not seek to dictate fees and we recognise many practitioners' discomfort in talking about money, it is our view that you have a responsibility to your patients to remind them to check that they have adequate cover and to raise the possibility of any shortfall in advance of treatment.

We aim to pay the vast majority of practitioners' fees in full and take a poor view of practitioners who continually charge in excess of our fee maxima without adequate justification. Where this causes distress or financial embarrassment to our members, we will review the practitioner's recognition status with us. We undertake regular audit of billing practice and give claiming members information about providers who charge in excess of our fee maxima or do not follow our billing guidelines.

We continuously monitor claims trends and variant billing to detect fraudulent activity. Fraud is a criminal offence and we follow up all cases with referral to regulating organisations or the Police as appropriate. Here are details of what we consider to be fraud.

We recommend the use of Healthcode electronic billing which is secure and ensures accuracy and greater speed of payment.