Severability of Interests
What this clause says
Except with respect to the Limits of Liability, this insurance applies separately to each Insured against whom Claim is made, and no statement or knowledge possessed by any Insured shall be imputed to any other Insured for purposes of determining coverage.
What this actually means
Severability treats each insured as if it held its own policy for the purpose of applying exclusions and conditions. Without it, the misconduct or knowledge of one insured can void coverage for everyone on the policy.
What it means for an operator
The scenario that matters is a caregiver or an administrator who committed an intentional act, or an owner who knew of a circumstance and did not disclose it. Intentional acts are excluded, and knowledge of a circumstance can defeat a claims-made policy. Full severability means the exclusion applies to the person who did it while the organization and every other insured remain covered for the negligence claims against them. Read whether severability extends to the application, since some forms allow the knowledge of a specified senior officer to be imputed to the entity. Then note who that named person is, because they become a single point of failure for the whole program.
Why the Policy Checker does not score this
This term is worth understanding and cannot be checked from a declarations page. There is no single field that would answer it, and scoring it from an assumption would produce a confident wrong finding, which is the one thing a tool like this must never do. It is defined here and left out of the check.
See this in your policy
Check this term against your own program.
Run the Policy CheckerRelated clauses
Common questions about this clause
- How do we choose the right retention on a senior care program?
- Who should be a named insured on a senior care liability policy?
- What is corporate negligence and why does it change the value of a case?
- Does our policy cover a Legionella outbreak in our building?
- What is a sexual abuse and molestation sublimit, and how much is enough?