Personal Health Insurance
Protecting your child’s health with child only insurance

Most parents regard their children as the most important and precious thing in the world. That is natural, as is the desire to do what’s best for them in terms of providing protection. That’s why you may be thinking of private health cover and specifically, child only insurance.

Private health insurance alongside the NHS

Private health insurance works alongside the NHS to provide cover for ailments that are typically not urgent or requiring very long-term critical illness care. It means that if you are unhappy with perhaps say a lengthy NHS waiting list to see a specialist, that you can generally opt to see a specialist privately and have those costs met by your private medical insurance policy.

This means that you can obtain very fast appointments with consultants or others forms of specialist and fast access to modern hospitals and treatment centres.

Child only insurance through private health insurance

Although private medical insurance (PMI) has been around for a long time, a more recent introduction is the child only insurance policy.

If you personally need treatment or a consultation, then you may be prepared to wait if there are delays in the NHS. Yet you may feel differently about a child and should that be the case, there are policies designed to offer child only private health cover.

Provisions of a child only private cover policy

Policies typically differ between providers so it is necessary to check but even so, you may find that such a policy may often provide:

• fast access to specialists and treatment;
  
• dental and optical care;
  
• access to specialist paediatric hospitals;
• evaluation of speech and speech therapy if required;
• accommodation for parents if hospital stays are required.
  

There is little more distressing for a parent that when a child is in need of medical attention – even if the condition is not necessarily an illness as such or serious. Being able to deal with it quickly and effectively may be a major attraction.

Costs

As you may expect, the cost of private medical insurance protection varies both between providers and by the nature of the protection you wish to purchase. As a general rule though, many providers recognise that having children isn’t cheap and most parents need to be mindful of their overall family budget.

As a result they have created plans that may be surprisingly economic - some for example, even offer cover for newborns entirely free-of-charge on an existing PMI policy until its next renewal date.

In the final analysis, the cost of protecting you child through private medical child only insurance may be a small price to pay for the peace if mind it may provide.