1. Two different things, often confused
Professional indemnity insurance covers claims arising from the practitioner's professional acts: negligent treatment, poor advice, a bad outcome caused by a failure to take reasonable care. It is the cover that matters if a treatment harms you.
Public liability insurance covers injury or damage arising from the premises and the business: a fall on a wet floor, damage to your property. It is not treatment cover, and a certificate showing public liability insurance is not evidence of indemnity for clinical work.
Some practitioners hold one and describe it as the other, occasionally without realising. Asking specifically for professional indemnity, by name, avoids that conversation going nowhere.
2. How it works for regulated professionals
Doctors, dentists and nurses are required by their regulators to have adequate insurance or indemnity in place for their practice. That obligation is part of their professional registration, and a failure to hold it is itself a regulatory matter.
Many are covered through medical defence organisations, which provide indemnity and, importantly, support in responding to complaints and regulatory investigations. Cover for aesthetic practice is often separately declared and separately priced, and it depends on the practitioner having told the insurer accurately what they do.
3. How it works for everyone else
Non healthcare professionals can and frequently do hold insurance. There is a market of insurers and brokers serving aesthetic practitioners, and cover typically requires evidence of training on the specific procedures declared.
What varies is scope. Cover is generally granted procedure by procedure against the training presented, so an injector covered for anti wrinkle treatment and lip filler may have no cover for a treatment they started offering last month. Since nobody is inspecting, the only person who can tell you is the practitioner.
The absence of the wider structure discussed in when a non medic injects makes insurance carry more weight here than it does elsewhere, which is exactly why its limits matter.
4. The questions that produce useful answers
Who is your professional indemnity insurer, and can I have the name. Does the policy cover this specific procedure with this specific product. What is the limit of indemnity. Is the policy claims made, and do you carry run off cover. Are unlicensed products excluded.
These are not aggressive questions. A well run practice answers them without irritation because it has already thought about them. Irritation at question four is information.
5. Who pays for putting it right
Separately from insurance, there is the practical question of correction. If a result is asymmetric, if filler needs dissolving, if a review is needed, who pays.
Clinics differ, and very few publish a policy. Some include a review and one adjustment within a defined window. Some charge for everything. Some will dissolve their own work free of charge and charge for dissolving someone else's, which is reasonable and worth knowing in advance.
Ask for the correction policy in writing before treatment. If none exists, that is the answer. Our question checklist puts this alongside the other things worth settling before consent.
6. What making a claim actually involves
A clinical negligence claim requires you to show that the standard of care fell below what was reasonable and that the failure caused the harm. Both limbs have to be established, usually with expert evidence, and that is a slow and expensive process.
Time limits apply. In Scotland, personal injury claims are generally subject to a limitation period, and leaving it is one of the more common ways a valid claim becomes unrecoverable. Take legal advice early rather than after trying to resolve it privately for a year.
Before litigation there are usually better first steps: the clinic's own complaints process, the professional regulator where one applies, Healthcare Improvement Scotland where the service is registered, and trading standards where the issue is misleading claims. Those are set out in what to do when a treatment goes wrong.
7. Records, and why you should keep your own
Whatever route you take, evidence decides it. Keep the treatment record, the consent form, the product details including batch numbers if you can get them, the receipts and every message.
Photograph the area before treatment and at intervals afterwards, in the same light, at the same distance, with the same expression. Photographs taken casually in different lighting are close to useless in a dispute, and photographs taken carefully are close to decisive.
You are entitled to a copy of your health records where they are held by a healthcare provider, and data protection law gives you a right of access to personal data held about you more generally. The Information Commissioner's Office explains how to make that request.
8. What this reduces to
Insurance is a real protection and a partial one. It compensates after harm; it does not prevent it, and it only works if the policy covers the thing that happened and is still in force when you claim.
Treat the insurance question as one of four, alongside registration, prescribing and complication management. A practitioner who answers all four crisply has told you more about how they work than any gallery of results could.