Learn about what travel and medical insurance is available.

Travel and medical insurance

Students studying abroad must have fully comprehensive travel insurance cover. Sussex will provide students a travel cover for the length of their studies abroad (with 7 days added prior and after the official term dates).

Under that cover, it is understood that you may do some personal travel during weekends whilst you are abroad during your year / semester at your host university. However, it is not meant to cover you for any other activity you may decide to do abroad once the year / semester concludes, such as holidays, internships, research projects, etc.

If you are planning on being abroad before your studies start or after the term is over, you are responsible to obtain your own cover for that. Please be aware that some policies will only be valid if your trip starts and finish in the destination of purchase, or the UK, if that’s the ending destination. You must shop around for this accordingly and it might be best to start looking before your departure.

If you choose to purchase your own insurance, you must provide evidence that the policy has adequate cover. Contact us for more information

Essential insurance considerations include:

• emergency medical expenses, including the cost of medical treatment abroad and repatriation costs
• personal injury
• personal belongings (including credit/debit card or passport replacement)
• dental injury
• legal expenses.

The cover must begin on the date you leave home and end on the date you arrive back.

Your policy needs to cover all medical costs, including air ambulance. For any extreme sports, you must check if they are covered by your policy first. If you have an accident whilst intoxicated by alcohol, you may not be covered by your travel insurance.

You may have annual insurance cover on credit card and bank accounts, although this usually only lasts 30 days of every year and so is unsuitable for studying abroad.

US, Canada and Australia

In addition to a travel cover, you will be legally obliged to take out health insurance cover in the United States, Canada and Australia. You will be able to obtain this via the partner university.

Find our more on our destination pages for North America and Australasia

Europe

NHS rules mean that if you are going on a study abroad placement in an EU country which will last more than six weeks, you must apply for a free special Student Global Health Insurance Card (GHIC).

This provides state-funded healthcare in EU countries in a lot of scenarios, but you will still need additional travel insurance to ensure you are fully covered. GHIC card holders will receive the same level of everyday healthcare as a national of that country. If locals pay for prescriptions, then so will you with the GHIC. However, it doesn’t cover repatriation costs or if you need emergency medical costs, so you still need to purchase travel cover.

Asia

Students will now need to purchase National Insurance for Korea and Japan.

See more from Preparing to go abroad – the essentials