Risk Partners Life Sciences Roundtable 2024, thank you very much! Already for the 26.06.2025 >
Risk Partners Life Sciences Roundtable 2024, thank you very much! Already for the 26.06.2025 >
Properly insure the transportation of the volunteer and accompanying person to and from the clinical trial.
Medical progress is not possible without research. Before drugs and medical devices are approved, their effect, mode of action and safety must be tested on humans. This is done in clinical studies. In addition, new examination and treatment methods are also tested in clinical trials in order to gain scientifically sound findings. This participation is associated with increased health risks for the test subjects.
While we discussed volunteer insurance in Part 1 and radiation liability insurance in Part 3, in Part 2 we would like to take a closer look atcommuting accident insurance for clinical trials so that you are aware of the possible types of insurance for your trial and can make an informed decision.
The commuting accident insurance is taken out on behalf of the sponsor for participants (subjects and volunteers) of a clinical trial and their accompanying persons. It is not uncommon for this to be combined with the trial subject insurance provider, but it can also be a separate contract with another specialist insurer in this area.
Our experience in the event of a claim has taught us that loss of consciousness is not considered an insured claim in many circumstances. On the other hand, ethical standards of duty of care oblige us to provide the test subjects with appropriate care - in case of doubt, by providing an overnight stay in inpatient care. As a specialist insurance broker, we therefore make sure that this is insured for you.
The aim of commuting accident insurance is to insure the journey to and from the study center for the participants and accompanying person(s) in a clinical trial. This covers, for example, classic accident risks that can befall the trial participants. - e.g. a serious fall from a bicycle with serious consequences for the test person.
In the event of disability due to an accident, the test persons receive a fixed one-off payment from the commuting accident insurance. If a test person dies, the surviving dependants are covered by the agreed death benefit.
As can be seen from the example, the choice of mobility plays no role with regard to the insurance cover. It is therefore irrelevant for commuting accident insurance whether the outward and return journey was made by train, bicycle, car or on foot.
Travel accident insurance in addition to trial subject insurance underlines the responsibility of the sponsor's duty of care to do more than the legal minimum. This also goes down well with the ethics committees, for example.
In addition to sponsors or CROs with a duty of care, demand is often driven by the ethics committee. This is because the ethics committees are paying more and more attention to the risk of traveling and are therefore increasingly demanding insurance cover for this in addition to traditional volunteer insurance. We therefore receive typical requests for the travel accident insurance:
For a long time, it was challenging to insure the risk of "commuting accident" for clinical trial participants outside Germany. This situation has changed, not least thanks to tireless discussions between our colleagues at Risk Partners and the insurers, so that you can now also offer and benefit from the promise of commuting accident insurance for trial subjects in other European countries.
International study? We are familiar with the entire problem, because there is hardly a country in the world where we have not yet accompanied a clinical trial. We are happy to use our long-standing, reliable contacts with leading insurance companies and work together with what is still the most important insurance market in the world: Lloyd's of London. Last but not least, we were recently able to further strengthen our team with our experienced colleagues from Atrialis GmbH - experts in clinical trial insurance.
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