Tips for travelers injured overseas

A friend of a friend recently wrote to me, asking for advice as he was currently in a similar predicament to mine two months ago: suffering a serious injury in a foreign country. Fingers crossed you won’t need to call on this in the future!

Before you leave

Buy travel insurance! Buying travel insurance buys peace of mind. You don’t want to be lying in a foreign hospital in pieces, telling doctors to push back on tests or treatments because you can’t afford to pay.

Be sure your travel insurance allows for unlimited costs when it comes to accidents, for the reason above. Looking after your health should be the number one reason for buying insurance, so if it doesn’t provide that better to look for another policy.

I didn’t bring my bulky travel insurance booklet/ policy with me, but I did pack the one-page travel insurance certificate, which had my policy number, a brief summary of what my policy covered and most importantly the toll-free number I could call to report my accident. If you’re really diligent you’ll also copy and paste this document into your email, so that if your stuff gets stolen you can access it there. Double points if you do the same for your policy.

This last one is optional, but I would have found handy. On a piece of paper that you should carry in your wallet, write your name (first and last), your nationality, passport number, travel insurance company, blood type, and any allergies you have, particularly to any medicines. This was the information the hospital was after, and if you’re in a non-English speaking country it may very well be easier to show them this piece of paper than nurses having to mime “allergy”.

At the time of your accident

Poor you! First piece of advice, stay calm. Are you in a developing country? Don’t assume the healthcare system sucks, you may be (if you’re lucky) pleasantly surprised, particularly in countries more socialist than our own. And if you’re in a non-English speaking country, try not to get too frustrated, and be patient. After all you’re the one who doesn’t speak their language, not the other way around.

If the police get involved ask an officer for a police report, detailing the accident. Also ask your doctor for a medical report. Be sure it is on hospital letterhead, and includes the date of the accident, the injuries suffered, and their advice regarding treatment and whether you’re fit to travel. Also ask your doc if they mind giving you their contact details so that should you find later on you need to clarify anything.

If your injury doesn’t require any further treatment beyond that day, be sure to also take home any x-rays, or scans that were taken. These are yours, and may be useful if you find there are complications down the line.

From the moment of your injury, keep every single receipt of anything you pay for. Later when you get home, you can check exactly what your policy allows you to claim, but at the very least it should include treatment, tests, medicine and travel costs.

This is a strange one, and may depend on your insurance company, but I wished I’d paid everything with card not cash. When I did my claims, I put in my bank statement, and my insurance company paid exactly the amount that turned up on my statement – including any foreign currency conversion fees! This way you won’t get gipped if the Australian dollar gains between the time of your accident and the claim, or lose out on charges for withdrawing cash overseas (a cost that I couldn’t claim.)

Returning to your hotel

Call your insurance company. If yours was anything like mine, they will have provided a toll-free number that can be called from anywhere in the world. When you call it’s best to have the following details: your policy number or customer number, which should be on your travel insurance certificate, and an address and telephone number you can be reached on. Check with your hotel if you can give their details for the last two.

The insurance company will set up a case file for you, and put you through with their medical team (their own doctors) to talk about the accident, the injuries sustained and the treatment received. If you’re in a non-English speaking country this is a great opportunity to check that the treatment correlates with what you would have received in Australia, and any further questions you have that was too difficult to ask at the hospital, or was possibly lost in translation.

If you’re asking about medicine, read to them the generic drug name – which will be same across most of the globe, rather than the brand name given by the drug company – which often differs country to country. E.g. Panadol is the drug name, “paracetamol” is the generic drug name.

Did you have to alter your travel plans due to the injury?

You should be able to claim much of the costs of any pre-booked travel plans, just check with your policy. However if plane tickets are involved your insurance company will probably ask that you attempt to get a refund through the airline first.

In my case, although I was not due to fly on the day of the accident, I was not fit to fly on the day I was to leave on my side trip to Spain. But when I called the airline, they said that I could only get a refund if I called 6 hours prior to the flight, and was in the hospital on that day! Luckily I did have an appointment as part of my ongoing treatment on the day of the flight, so I called them the morning of the flight and said I had to go to the hospital that day so I couldn’t fly.

In the evening I emailed them a doctor’s certificate verifying this, and received a full refund on this flight.

Does your injury require ongoing treatment?

Things get a bit more complicated now, and what’s best to do depends on your injury, treatment, trip and policy. It’s something that you will probably work out with your insurance company, and if you have your full policy booklet in your email read the whole thing now!

So here I’ll just give some handy tips that the insurance company may not share with you as it’s not in their interest.

My insurance company were quite explicit that if surgery would be involved in my treatment their plan would be to fly me home as soon as the doctor said I was stable enough to do so, so that the surgery could be carried out in Australia. However, they reluctantly admitted that if my doc said the injury demanded immediate attention and couldn’t wait for me to be fit to fly, they would cover this treatment in Argentina.

Another thing to take into consideration is how long your trip is for. Even if you do have to fly home for treatment, my policy covered costs for a flight back to the holiday, if there was at least one month remaining of the trip. It’s details like these that makes having your full policy booklet in your email useful. I wouldn’t trust the person on the line from your insurance company to tell or know all these details.

If it is necessary for you to fly home, your insurance company should arrange and pay for that flight. Be sure to check they organise anything extra your injury may require. My injury meant I had to have my foot elevated for the length of the flight, so I had to fly business class, and receive hotel assistance and hotel transfers.

The last thing to note is that even if the accident happens on the second last day of your trip, and your policy expires the day after, so long as the accident happens during the time of the policy, they must pay all costs incurred by the injury until the day your doctor deems you fit to fly home, and you do so. For example, I was forced to stay in Buenos Aires two weeks after my policy expired, because my Doctor had not deemed me fit to fly. But I was still covered for costs related to the injury because the accident happened during policy coverage.

Making your claim

Once you return to Australia you will probably find a letter from your insurance company asking that you send in all your receipts, certificates and other supporting material.

The package I sent them included

I kept photocopies of everything I sent them, and thanks to the list, knew roughly how much I expected to be refunded.

A few weeks later an agent from the company emailed me back with a list of everything they were willing to refund me (practically everything!) and the amounts for each item. I doubled checked that they had recorded and added correctly, and approved it. A week later I had a cheque come through the mail, yay!

If you have any additional tips, add them in the comment section.