Ms Margaret O'Donnell:

It is very difficult to answer because I do not know. Every member of the Irish Association of Plastic Surgeons, IAPS, has personal professional indemnity insurance. If a commercial clinic has doctors, nurses or therapists, I do not know whether those people have professional indemnity in addition to the enterprise insurance. If I were to laser a patient to erase red veins or brown marks, it would come under my professional indemnity as a plastic surgeon, which costs a phenomenal amount of money. A therapist doing a laser treatment on the same lesion does not pay anything like the same amount. The Senator is correct, in that separate insurance is required for a truck or a car. While the Medical Protection Society, MPS, which insures most surgeons, asks for one's range of practice, it is a bit blurred in cases where people are working outside their level of competence, as the Deputy described. I can see where the problems are, if that helps us find the answers.