Medical Travel Insurance

A pre-existing medical condition is a condition that you’ve had symptoms, medication, surgery, investigations or medical appointments for in the past two years. This also includes cardiovascular and circulatory conditions outside of the past two years. It’s important you declare any pre-existing medical conditions you have when taking out a policy with us.

You can declare your medical conditions through our medical screening process, which is a set of questions for us to understand how your medical conditions affect you. This can be completed either online or over the phone.

All pre-existing conditions need to be declared on your policy. This may help you to avoid large medical bills if you need treatment in another country. Failure to disclose any pre-existing medical conditions may affect the validity of your policy should you need to claim.

Here are a few of the most common conditions we cover:

• Arthritis
• Asthma
• Breast cancer
• Cancer
• Diabetes
• Epilepsy
• Heart conditions
• Hernia
• High blood pressure and high cholesterol
• Gallstones
• Multiple Sclerosis

You can choose cover for pre-existing medical conditions across all our policies, as long as we’re able to offer you this cover. We’ll just ask you a few questions about your conditions either online or over the phone to start tailoring your policy.

When applying for travel insurance for existing medical conditions, we’ll ask you to declare any conditions through our medical screening process.

Declaring all of your pre-existing conditions is vital. Failing to do so may affect the validity of your policy, should you need to claim further down the line.

You should have to hand:

Complete our simple medical screening online today.

If you are taken to hospital as an emergency by ambulance or any other emergency service, you will need to make sure that you or someone can call us as soon as possible.

By calling our 24-hour medical emergency helpline, we may be able to help you locate the safest and most appropriate place to have treatment. We can also help by acting as a translator if your medical team doesn't speak English.

It's important that you declare any changes to your health or medical conditions, even after you have bought your policy. These changes may mean an additional charge or a change to the type of cover you’ve bought. Please contact our Customer Services team to tell us about any changes.

Medical emergencies abroad can be very expensive. This is why most medical travel insurance policies seem to offer an exaggerated amount of cover, often exceeding several millions of pounds. A stomach bug, or infection, treated in a hospital in the USA with return flights home can easily return a medical bill of £100,000^.

Our Basic medical travel insurance policy offers up to £5 million of cover for medical emergencies and repatriation. There is up to unlimited cover with our Comprehensive policies.

If you’re travelling to Europe, you should always carry your EHIC or GHIC with you. These cards give you access to free or discounted emergency medical care in EU countries. While the EHIC and GHIC cards are very useful, they’re not a substitute for travel insurance with pre-existing conditions.

Your EHIC or GHIC card is not always a pass to free healthcare. You may have to pay a substantial amount of the medical bill yourself, or you may be taken to a private hospital. In these cases, travel insurance can cover you.

We don’t consider pregnancy to be a pre-existing medical condition for travel insurance. You won’t need to declare your pregnancy on your policy unless you have an underlying medical condition or complication related to your pregnancy.

For more information, see our pregnancy travel insurance page.