Re-printed with permission from
Markel Insurance Company
www.martialartsinsurance.com
From their "Risk Management News" Newsletter
- August 2004
Maintaining
Control - A Professional Standard of Care
We see many claims that involve a teacher
or coach misjudging their strike or using aggressive
hands-on coaching techniques. Whether you are a Sifu,
Sensei, Sabom or Coach, you have a very high degree of
professional responsibility to ensure the safety of your
students. This is especially true when your students
are young children. Because children’s bones, muscles, and
tendons are not fully developed, they can be injured more
easily and more seriously than adults.
Here’s one example. An instructor and a
student were engaged in a non-contact sparring event. The
student threw a punch with a closed fist and the instructor
ducked to avoid being struck. The instructor then punched
back and landed a blow with a closed fist to the student’s
rib cage. The student incurred over $50,000 in medical
expenses and the claim ultimately cost more than $100,000 to
resolve.
Maintaining control and exercising a
professional standard of care would have prevented this
claim from happening. Legal Concepts in Sports: A Primer, by
Linda Jean Carpenter, provides a simple definition of a
standard of care—the duty owed is to protect the student or
athlete from the foreseeable risk of unreasonable harm. In
the claim above, the teacher failed to maintain a proper
standard of care when he punched the student. Thus, a costly
error occurred.
How a standard of care is applied in a
situation can vary. Much depends on the hazardous nature of
the activity. Also, how a standard of care is interpreted
may be influenced by participants’ age or maturity, skill
level, health and conditioning; age, skill, and size of the
competitors / participants; amount of supervision; and class
size.
A standard of care can also be determined
by your state’s legal environment. As a professional, you
are held to a higher standard of accountability when
providing a standard of care owed your students. If you
don’t, you too may commit a costly error that can result in
loss of students and possibly increased insurance cost. Just
imagine the personal cost of the above claim if there were
no insurance coverage to help pay the loss.
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