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Any of the six insurers the Medical Board recognises — the real answer is "one of them, today" 1. At JMO level it is free or near-free: MIGA advertises free cover for doctors in training until midway through PGY3 4. Your hospital indemnifies only what you do as its employee 2; everything else is yours.
What the rule actually is. Under the National Law you must not practise without appropriate professional indemnity insurance arrangements covering all aspects of your practice, and the Medical Board's PII registration standard has bound every registered doctor since 1 January 2016 1. Ahpra's fact sheet is blunt about the rest: you are personally responsible for it, the cover can come through an employer, a defence organisation or a direct policy, and an employer's arrangements "will only provide cover for activities you carry out as part of your duties during your employment" 2.
So what does the hospital actually cover? Civil claims arising out of your hospital job. Not private work, not surgical assisting outside the role, not a locum the hospital did not engage you for, and not you personally at the point where your interests and the hospital's stop being the same thing — a coronial matter, an employment dispute, an Ahpra notification 2.
Who is on the list. The Board names Avant, Berkshire Hathaway Specialty (via Tego), Guild, MDA National, MIPS and MIGA as the medical indemnity insurers meeting the Commonwealth minimum product standards 1. At JMO level the products are close enough that price and who answers the phone at 2am decide it, and the price is usually zero: MIGA advertises free cover for doctors in training until midway through the third postgraduate year 4, Avant sells a doctor-in-training policy including cover for training and employment disputes and disciplinary matters 5, and MIPS offers an "employer indemnified only" membership at a lower fee that still covers Ahpra complaints and professional disputes 6.
Two obligations people miss. You must tell Ahpra within seven days if your PII arrangements are no longer in place — it is a listed relevant event 3. And when you stop practising you must take out run-off cover for matters arising from your earlier practice 2.
What the sub says. Sign up while it is free, and read the policy rather than the brochure 7. The counter-argument, fairly made, is that the horror stories you hear about hospitals abandoning JMOs are mostly told to you by people selling insurance 7.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
I have seen people thrown under the bus by hospitals. I always have my own insurance.
Seeing as it's free for the first couple of years there's no harm in signing up to all of them.
But if you don't see any possible scenario where your interests may diverge from the hospital's interests then I have a bridge to sell you.
Avant gave me proper advice on what i was legally obligated to do (nothing) and who could force me to actually write a report (a judge).
Yes, the hospital does indemnify you. But the insurance companies usually provides free insurance for interns and jmos.
Asked 44 times on r/ausjdocs (title-regex count) · encoded by hand from the numbered sources, retrieved 12 Sept 2026; no AI wrote any of it. how the count was made
asked_count = posts in r_ausjdocs_posts.jsonl (19,145 posts, 2022-09-13 to 2026-09-12) whose title matches /indemnity|\bMDA\b|\bAvant\b|\bMIGA\b|\bMIPS\b|medical defence/i. Quotes are the highest-scoring comments in the JMO indemnity threads, chosen to put the 'the hospital already covers you' reading beside the 'your interests diverge' one and a concrete account of what an MDO actually did. Ahpra and the Medical Board are recorded under source kind 'college' as the nearest profession-level official bucket; the MDOs' own product pages are recorded as secondary, since they are marketing for their own products.