Perils of wisdom—covering risk to your home and office

Issue: BCMJ, vol. 64, No. 7, September 2022, Page 288 News
By: Julie Kwan, BBA, CFP, CLU, GBA

Westland Insurance Group Ltd., Doctors of BC’s home- and office-insurance partner, provides advice to members on risk considerations for their home and office.

Home-insurance policies are issued on several different forms, which establish and define the causes of loss (or perils) for which coverage is provided. The best and broadest form is a comprehensive, or all-risks, form, which is the best form to insure your home with.

An all-risks form insures against all types of losses, subject to a list of exclusions specified in the policy. These exclusions outline when coverage does not apply. The onus is on the insurer to show that an exclusion applies following a loss; otherwise, coverage will be provided.

The main types of losses insured under this form include the following:

  • Fire: from either inside or outside the home, including forest fires.
  • Windstorm: caused by winds that damage the home or cause trees or other debris to hit the home.
  • Theft and burglary: inside or away from the home, such as theft from a vehicle.
  • Water damage: caused by pipes bursting, dishwashers or laundry machines failing, or bathtub or sink overflows.
  • Sewer backup: the backing up of interior or exterior drains.

Depending on your geographical area, consider adding the following optional perils to your home-insurance policy:

  • Earthquake: covers damage to the home during an earthquake and carries a separate, high deductible.
  • Overland flood: covers the overflow of natural or manufactured bodies of fresh water (rivers and lakes). Coverage limits may depend on the location of the home.

When insuring a medical office, it is best to choose a similar comprehensive or all-risks form for office contents, equipment, and any leasehold improvements you have made to the space or for which you are responsible under the lease agreement.

In addition to the above perils, larger offices storing data on their servers should consider adding cyber insurance to cover data hacking, extortion, and ransom.
—Julie Kwan
Insurance Advisor, Doctors of BC

hidden

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Julie Kwan, BBA, CFP, CLU, GBA. Perils of wisdom—covering risk to your home and office. BCMJ, Vol. 64, No. 7, September, 2022, Page(s) 288 - News.


Above is the information needed to cite this article in your paper or presentation. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends the following citation style, which is the now nearly universally accepted citation style for scientific papers:
Halpern SD, Ubel PA, Caplan AL, Marion DW, Palmer AM, Schiding JK, et al. Solid-organ transplantation in HIV-infected patients. N Engl J Med. 2002;347:284-7.

About the ICMJE and citation styles

The ICMJE is small group of editors of general medical journals who first met informally in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1978 to establish guidelines for the format of manuscripts submitted to their journals. The group became known as the Vancouver Group. Its requirements for manuscripts, including formats for bibliographic references developed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), were first published in 1979. The Vancouver Group expanded and evolved into the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), which meets annually. The ICMJE created the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals to help authors and editors create and distribute accurate, clear, easily accessible reports of biomedical studies.

An alternate version of ICMJE style is to additionally list the month an issue number, but since most journals use continuous pagination, the shorter form provides sufficient information to locate the reference. The NLM now lists all authors.

BCMJ standard citation style is a slight modification of the ICMJE/NLM style, as follows:

  • Only the first three authors are listed, followed by "et al."
  • There is no period after the journal name.
  • Page numbers are not abbreviated.


For more information on the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, visit www.icmje.org

BCMJ Guidelines for Authors

Leave a Reply