Many Human Services and Healthcare organizations rely on their staff to visit client homes, facilities, and provide transportation for clients. A strong set of controls paired with the appropriate insurance coverage can significantly lower an organization’s cost of risk as it relates to auto exposure. Setting up the right controls is largely what will determine an organization’s cost of risk. Insurance coverage is the simplest part.
Prevention of scenarios with the right systems in place:
Scenario 1: A Non Profit checks Motor Vehicle Reports (MVRs) upon hire and even annually. An employee transporting clients causes a severe accident with another vehicle. Since the last MVR run was clean, they are found to have a suspended license. This is due to repeated reckless driving and speeding violations.
Coverage Response:The carrier pushes back citing it is the employer’s responsibility to know the status of the driver’s record and take preventative action. The claim is denied by the carrier. Then, the Non Profit assumes full responsibility for the cost of the injured claimant in the other vehicle, the injured clients, and the physical damage to the vehicles. The damages
Preventative Solution: There are vendors who can provide Automated MVR updates any time there is an event on a driver record, allowing the employer to take immediate action. Tie the Automated MVR update system to MVR grading criteria and a Progressive Discipline Policy within a well-defined Drivers Agreement. This is to hold drivers accountable and encourage safe driving.
Scenario 2: A Home Health Care Agency declines Hired and Non Owned Auto Coverage and does not require employees to maintain a minimum personal auto limit. The Agency’s driving exposure includes personal vehicle use:
Nurse Supervisors driving to client homes & facilities
Aides running errands and providing transportation for clients to Dr.’s appointments
An Aide maintains the statutory minimum insurance requirement, transports a client and causes an accident with another vehicle. The aide totals the other vehicle. The other driver and the client sustain injuries and sue the aide for $100,000 each.
Coverage Response: The statutory limit provides a maximum of $50,000 bodily injury liability to all persons and $10,000 to property, meaning the Agency is responsible for $75,000 to both the other driver and the client as well as value of the vehicle less the $10,000 from the aide’s policy. As Hired and Non Owned Auto isn’t in place, this is uninsured loss the Agency would pay out of pocket.
Preventative Solution: The Agency should require a minimum limit for personal auto coverage to form a Primary Layer before the business insurance needs to respond. We recommend a $300,000 limit. Further, proof of coverage and payment should be collected annually. Purchase Hired and non owned auto with a $1,000,000 CSL AND included in an Umbrella.
Event organizers must shoulder a significant burden—they have full responsibility for balancing health, safety, and fun at their events. That means they are also culpable for any event-related health and safety failings.
This weighty responsibility can wear down those not prepared to bear it. As an event organizer, how can you effectively do your job while dealing with the worrying fact that you will be accountable for health and safety slip-ups? Simple: You can keep employees, contractors and members of the public safe at your event by following some easy rules of thumb.
Planning Your Event
When initiating the event planning process, remember to keep the level of detail in your planning proportionate to your event’s scale and degree of risk. Establishing such limits early on will help you avoid overlooking important health and safety hazards or bogging yourself down in unimportant details.
Next, choose a dedicated team to assist in your various duties. Assess your strengths and weaknesses and pick a team that can provide support in the areas where you feel weakest.
Once you assemble your team, make sure there is a clear understanding of who will be responsible for what. Good communication from the start tends to last throughout the whole planning process.
Defer to your organization’s health and safety policy for help assigning health and safety responsibilities to your teammates. Most organizations always assign certain positions the same health and safety responsibilities to ensure consistency.
Only after everyone on your team understands his or her general health and safety responsibilities can you begin writing the event’s safety plan, which identifies what resources and facilities you will need in order to uphold health and safety regulations. Safety plans work using the logic of risk assessments, or assessing the workspace and work-related activities in an effort to identify and prevent all risks associated with your job.
In order to write your event’s safety plan, you will need the following information:
The scale, type and scope of the event
The type and size of the audience
The event’s location
The event’s duration
The time of day and year the event will be held
As you write the safety plan, be sure to involve your employees, other workers and any stakeholders, such as the venue owner or the local authority. Widespread involvement and cooperation can help you spot hazards you missed. Furthermore it can help guarantee that everyone on-site is on the same page.
The information contained in your safety plan will be the baseline for determining what workplace facilities you need—such as first-aid, washing, toilet, eating, rest and changing facilities—to minimize risks and ensure the well-being of on-site workers.
Emergency & Contingency Planning
One of your most important responsibilities is establishing emergency response plans. Without writing concrete plans to follow in an emergency, you risk the liability of endangering people at your event.
Using the information found in your safety plan, develop procedures for specific emergencies, such as fire, structural failure or severe weather. The more specific your emergency plans, the better. Enlisting the help of the police and fire and rescue services can help confirm that your emergency plans are appropriate and safe. Your emergency plans should outline how to accomplish the requirements listed below:
Get people away from immediate danger.
Summon and assist emergency services.
Handle both severe and non-life-threatening injuries.
Deal with the non-injured, such as attendees at a festival with camping.
Liaise with emergency services and other authorities.
Protect threatened property.
Be sure every on-site volunteer or worker is prepared to rapidly halt the event and initiate an evacuation in the event of an emergency. This process, known as “show stop,” involves identifying key people to help initiate the evacuation and outlines the safest, quickest way to end the event. Everyone should know their responsibilities and be prepared to act.
Managing an Event
Your duties as event organizer do not stop once the event starts. If anything, they increase. As the event begins, shift your focus from planning and paperwork to managing and monitoring site operations. Your responsibilities during the event include the following:
Managing – Develop appropriate management systems for each phase of your event. During the actual event, because you cannot be everywhere at once, rely on these systems to help control health and safety risks. Solid planning is essential to hassle-free managing.
Coordinating – Foster cooperation between all workers during the event. This promotes different teams solving minor problems together rather than relying on your judgment at every turn.
Disseminating information – Communicate all the information you gleaned from your risk assessments to everyone on-site—neglecting to do so renders all your work pointless. Disseminate information by word of mouth and signage.
Supervising – Your employees and other on-site workers should be competent to safely do their jobs. Make sure you allocate an appropriate level of supervision to ensure site-wide competence.
Monitoring – Take time to assess your methods and ensure they are being followed. Periodically monitoring your event will help your management team stay agile and ready to respond to any potential problems.
The Key to a Safe Event is Tailored Risk Management
The risks you face depend on your event—and insurance solutions for event organizers are contingent on the type and scale of your events. Whatever the size or nature of your events, Metropolitan Risk Advisory and John Hague, Jr. have all the resources to create an insurance solution perfectly tailored to your organization. With lots of Non-profit solution experience, John can help you make sure your event is safe and successful! Enjoy the sense of stability that comes with insuring your event and bolstering your planning efforts with thorough risk management.
Multi-tasking is an everyday occurrence in businesses and is in most cases a necessity in order to get things done in a timely fashion. Author Steven Berlin Johnson describes multitasking as “skimming the surface of the incoming data, picking out the relevant details, and moving on to the next stream.” Skimming is what people do when they look at their receipt when leaving the grocery store, not what you do when balancing your company’s checkbook and reviewing P&L data. Here is some bookkeeper for business advice.
When deciding what is better for your business, ask yourself if consolidation of daily tasks is the answer. Do you want your in-house bookkeeper answering the phones, assisting clients, or doing HR all day ON TOP of the bookkeeping? Probably not! The assembly line automation was popularized by Henry Ford. The idea was that “hiring a specialist to perform a specific function creates a lot of efficiency.”
Things to consider about a bookkeeper for business:
This 3rd party service is a vendor that can be replaced. They want your business, so it is implied that there will be an expected level of customer service in order to keep the account.
Bookkeeping services are like any other business. They compete and they need to stay ahead of their competition in order to win accounts. They do this by constantly setting themselves apart and creating innovative ways to provide you efficient and accurate service.
Consistency. If something happens to your in house bookkeeper, what is the protocol? One day, maybe two days is manageable. But what happens if it’s longer than that, or they just up and quit? Bookkeeping services have built in processes to handle this and it is off of your plate so that you will get the SAME level of service no matter who your representative is.
Think of what tasks you have on a daily, weekly, monthly, or even quarterly basis. As an employer, you are responsible for:
Accurately calculating employee earnings and handing out paychecks
Deciding on tax withholdings and payroll deductions
Keeping current on new regulations, tax rates, filing of taxes, personnel issues and other payroll variables.
Beyond all of this, there is the small aspect of running, and ideally growing the business. Why waste your time on performing these functions when you could hand this off to someone like our friend Kandi Brem at www.Brembookkeeping.com, whose ONLY focus is making sure all of this is accurate and that the lights stay on. I am sure you can find better ways to use that time on things like improving your product or service, increasing revenue, and hiring talented employees.
Unfortunately this is a question facing both interstate and intrastate trucking companies whose home office is in state “A” but they operate in states B,C,D,E. etc… These companies face what is called Multi-State Exposure. This occurs when a driver gets injured on the job in a different state from which his company is domiciled. What nobody tells these companies is that the driver has the ability to receive benefits from more than one state on your dime!
Competitive rates for Workers Comp Insurance in the trucking industry are difficult to obtain due to the difficulty the underwriter faces assessing the risk. Add multiple state workers comp laws into that equation and you have a recipe for high premiums, open claims and payouts that are double and even triple what they should be.
When an out of state claim happens, two jurisdictions come in to play. If the claim is handled by the company’s home state the driver will retain legal counsel in the state in which the injury occurred. Once qualified to receive benefits from the home state, the driver can go the state where the injury occurred and receive additional benefits. This is known as “Piggybacking.” This is the cost of not fully comprehending the Workers Comp Laws in the states you operate in and this can certainly be an expensive lesson.
