We focus on being able to pay more Critical Illness claims to your clients, faster. With our improved definitions, we've worked hard to make them clearer, giving them added peace of mind.
What's new?
- We’ve added two new full definitions: Severe mental illness and Severe bowel disease.
- We’ve improved five full definitions: Dementia, Heart attack, Cancer, Coma and Aplastic anaemia.
- We’ve added four new additional cover conditions: Bowel disease, Type 1 Diabetes, Desmoid Type Fibromatosis, and Cutaneous Lymphoma.
- We’ve made changes to four additional cover conditions: Gastrointestinal stromal tumour (GIST), Neuroendocrine tumour (NET), Pituitary gland tumour, and Non-melanoma skin cancer.
- We’ve improved and simplified our child type 1 diabetes definition under Enhanced Children’s Critical Illness cover, to reflect that there are other methods of insulin replacement than insulin injections, as well as removing the 12 month treatment requirement.
- We’ve increased the maximum pay out under additional cover conditions from £30,000 to £35,000 to reflect increased living costs and allowing us to better support your clients’ needs.
Hear from our expert
Our protection specialist, Jennifer Gilchrist discusses how by using data and insights from customers and advisers, we've improved our Critical Illness definitions so that we can pay more claims to your clients, faster.
Jennifer Gilchrist, Protection Specialist
All of that information is used by us so that we can deliver real value to customers at the end of the day and also provide the best outcomes we possibly can.
Transcript
0:06
Hi, I'm Jennifer Gilchrist, I'm a Protection Specialist with Royal London.
0:18
We've looked at 4 areas. We've looked at mental health, which is the most disclosed condition on our applications. And what we've added there is a severe mental illness definition. We have a child diabetes definition, and that is the second highest reason for claim for children under our Critical Illness Cover. What we found was that the definition was stopping us paying out claims quickly. So what we have done is changed the wording so that we can pay claims quicker, we’ve added it to adults cover aswell and what we've done is we've kept the same definition for both.
0:59
So it's consistent across the product. For bowel disease what we've done there is we've removed the individual conditions that we had - Ulcerative colitis and also Crohn's disease and made a much wider definition, bowel disease, which means that there will be other conditions that customers will be able to claim on they wouldn't have done before. And we've also made changes to our cancer definition.
1:33
Our people are always looking at data and insight and feedback from customers and advisers, and the market in general. And part of that data and insight is very much about the claims process - the claims that we pay, the claims that we maybe couldn’t pay, but also looking at the process that customers go through to actually have their claims approved.
1:57
All of that information is used by us, so that we can deliver real value to customers at the end of the day, and also provide the best outcomes we possibly can.
2:15
With now 1 in 2 of us experiencing cancer in our lifetime, obviously cancer is a key area of focus within our Critical Illness product. From Royal London in 2022, two thirds of our claims were for cancer. We actually paid out over £80 million to our customers who have had a cancer diagnosis.
2:39
This year, we have seen the ABI come out with a change to the definition for cancer within the minimum standards. And that was a key area for us to then look at our coverage of cancer across the product.
2:55
What we have done this time is we've adopted the ABI minimum standard wording but what we've done in some key areas is extend the cover - so we’ve been looking at if there were any gaps and if there were specific areas where, for example, we were finding it quite difficult to pay claims because of the specific wording within the definition. What we've done is we've actually split some of the wording out and made new definitions. We wanted very much to speed up the experience that people had when they were coming through and trying to make a cancer claim.
Benefits of our Critical Illness Cover
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Wide range of definitions
Help your clients build financial resilience - our enhanced definitions will give your clients confidence in knowing what they're covered for, making it easier for them if they need to make a claim. Visit our interactive search tool for a full list of our definitions.
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Children's Critical Illness Cover
Give your clients flexibility - they can add Enhanced or Standard Children's Critical Illness Cover, or leave it off entirely if they don't have or don't plan on having children.
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Children's Critical Illness Cover Conversion option
With our Enhanced Children’s Critical Illness Cover, we automatically include a Children’s Critical Illness Cover Conversion Option.
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Advanced surgery benefit
Help your clients get paid as soon as they're on an NHS waiting list for any of the surgeries we cover under our full payment conditions.
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Free Cover
In many cases we can offer cover before your client's plan starts, offering peace of mind from the moment we receive their application.
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Helping Hand
All our Personal Menu Plans come with our Helping Hand support service. Helping Hand is there for your clients, whichever stage in life they're at, and as a plan owner it doesn't cost them anything extra to use.
Product details
Find out more information about the options and features of our Critical Illness Cover, plan details and terms and conditions.