A GP turned adviser has emphasised that intermediaries must warn their clients when they are in a “red flag situation” with their financial protection and life setting.
Dr Luke Mitchell, financial planner at Quilter, highlighted that financial advisers have the same duty of care as doctors and need to have difficult conversations to be able to sleep at night.
“When I was in training to be a GP, one of the key things we would be drilled on is red flag symptoms,” Dr Mitchell told the Scottish Widows Dr Marius Barnard Recognition Event.
“If a patient came to me and said: ‘I’m an ex-miner, I’ve lost a couple stone in weight, I’ve got this cough and now there’s blood’, that is a cancer patient until I know otherwise and I need to make sure that he doesn’t have cancer or he does.
“In some sense, as advisers we have a similar duty of care to point out to clients when they are in, in a red flag situation.
“If you’ve got a client with a minimal emergency fund and their only sick pay is statutory sick pay, that’s a really vulnerable position for that client to be in.”
‘Have difficult conversations to sleep at night’
Dr Mitchell (pictured centre right) also noted that addressing this was vital with cancer and other diseases are happening earlier and lasting longer.
“We need to be pointing that out and having those difficult conversations and accepting that that’s an important part of the job and a part of our duty,” he continued.
“We don’t want to be on the flip side of that and say, ‘Oh, I didn’t really want to have that difficult conversation’ and then that client be financially ruined as a result.
“That’s the way I’m trying to think about it, we have that same duty of care, and while it’s a different context in some ways it’s the same topic, but you need to be having those conversations to sleep at night as well,” he concluded.
