Terms and Conditions

A suspension lets you pause your policy and stop paying premiums for a period of time if you’re going through a difficult or changing situation or travelling overseas.

You can’t make claims for services or events that occur during the period your policy is suspended, and the suspension applies to everyone covered under the policy.

For all suspension types:

• You need to have been a Member for at least 12 months before you can suspend your policy.
• There must be 12 months between suspensions. This starts from the end date of your last suspension.

Different suspension types have different minimum and maximum lengths:

• Financial Hardship: 3 months minimum, 12 months maximum
• Parental Leave: 3 months minimum, 12 months maximum
• Overseas Travel: 3 months minimum, 24 months maximum (evidence of travel may be required to extend past 12 months)
• Secondment: 3 months minimum, 24 months maximum (for group insurance scheme Members only).

Change to overseas cover:

• We’re removing the ‘overseas cover’ option where Members paid a percentage of their premium while overseas. Members can now use the Overseas Travel suspension instead.

See Fact Sheets about suspensions above.

We’ve updated our suspensions to make them clearer, fairer, and more consistent for all Members, and provide new suspension options.

Suspensions are designed to support Members during temporary periods of change or difficulty.

The changes help make sure suspensions are used for short-term situations, not repeatedly or long-term.

By introducing clear minimum and maximum timeframes, eligibility criteria, and simpler terms, we’re reducing confusion and setting expectations upfront.

See Fact Sheets about suspensions above.

Modules can now only be removed at the start of your policy year.

This helps us to keep premiums fair for all Members and aligns with how cover and benefits are designed – modules are priced and structured based on annual cover periods.

This review focused on removing duplication and adopting current clinical terminology, rather than introducing new services. In future, we will look to do regular reviews that will address new technologies, requests, and market changes.

The lists have been modernised to remove duplication and adopt current clinical terminology.

Changes have focused on clarifying coverage, not reducing cover.

This will help to ensure we can maintain respectful, helpful and constructive interactions with our Members and provide a safe and supportive environment for our staff.

We’re happy to send you links to read or download these documents.

With the increased cost of printing and postage, sending out a Terms & Conditions document to one Member is about $7.00.

As a not-for-profit society, we’re moving to email communications and encouraging more use of the Member Portal to help us reduce costs.

The general exclusions section is longer because we’ve rewritten it in plain English and added more detail to make it clearer and easier to understand.

Some exclusions that were previously grouped together or briefly described are now explained in more detail or separated into clearer categories. This makes the document more transparent, but it does not mean your cover has been reduced.