15 December 2022
Health & Care Board update – December 2022
Scott Reid, Health & Care Board Deputy Chair, provides an update.
On Monday the 5 December, we held our last Health & Care Board meeting of 2022. As usual, there were many topics to discuss including our Practice Board objectives for 2022-2023 and hot topic themes for the remainder of the 2022-23 session. We were delighted to be joined by our guest Peter Hamilton, who is Head of Market Engagement for Zurich; Government Disability and Access Ambassador for the insurance sector; Chair of the ABI Long-Term Care working party and the Retail Protection Committee.
We had an engaging discussion with Peter who has a wealth of industry experience across several of our key objectives. The topics included: his current industry roles as Disability and Access Ambassador and Long-Term Care working party; Equality Act 2010 and access to insurance; and views on pooling risk versus granular pricing. Gaining Peter’s perspective on these topics and how the H&C Board can contribute was extremely valuable.
We discussed access to insurance which can be a challenge for people with a disability or health condition. The industry has taken several steps over recent years including signposting which will direct people with a disability to a specialist advisor. Some advisers are forming alliances with Protection specialists, or they can direct customers to a new BIBA website (https://www.biba.org.uk/find-insurance/). A further initiative is to make it easier to recruit and retain people with a disability who aspire to pursue a career in the insurance sector. There is further information available in GOV.UK on the disability confident employer scheme (https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/disability-confident-campaign) and an organisation Group for Autism, Insurance, Investment and Neurodiversity, GAIN (https://www.gaintogether.org/) . These initial steps will bring focus around fairness/transparency and removing barriers that can only be of benefit to our industry and wider society.
Another hot topic discussed is the debate around pooling versus more granular underwriting/pricing. Using more granular data for pricing or underwriting may make it more of a challenge for people with disability/health conditions to access insurance. On-the-other hand, if we are able to consider more information on people’s health and lifestyle, then this may reduce the risk for healthier customers which will improve access for this segment, but on the downside reduce access for people in poorer health. This an important debate that as a board we will be taking forward in our themes of 2023 given its importance for conditions such as mental health and diabetes.
Finally, Peter discussed and provided an update in his role as Chair of the ABI Long-Term Care working party. Several different government policies on social care were discussed, noting the recent announcement to delay the UK government's planned cap on care costs by a further 2 years. We have recently launched a Social Care working party that aims to consider unmet needs and how social and private insurance can provide part of the funding solution.
Next, the Board considered our Objectives for 2022-23 and key topics. We had a good discussion in terms of what as a Board we should be focusing on. Our key priority themes are:
- Social Care
- Data Science
- Sustainability
Other topics which were also discussed included Covid-19 medium/long-term impact, Cost of living, Access to insurance, Insurtech, Wellness, and the recent regulatory activity in Europe on the “Right to be forgotten”.
Several other updates were discussed including:
- soft launch of our Digital community that is being rolled out, and that will enable better opportunities for members to engage and collaborate. This will be open to members later in the first quarter of 2023
- international association updates including IAA and AAE
- DEI online survey across Boards, Committees and volunteer groups that will take place in January
- Lifelong Learning sub-committee providing an update on recent events including the life conference, a talk in November by Dame Sally Davies, and “Beyond actuarial analysis” in December. For future events, we refer you to: https://www.actuaries.org.uk/learn-develop/attend-event.
- Research sub-committee update on working party activity and new working parties that are being set up including Climate Change and Techniques in Data science, we refer you to the website for further information: https://www.actuaries.org.uk/practice-areas/health-and-care/research-working-parties.
We also wanted to flag that the call for speakers for the IFoA Conference 2023 is now open. For those not familiar, it’s a cross-practice, hybrid conference, which replaces some of the smaller IFoA conferences we used to have, including the Health, Care & Protection conference. The IFoA Conference will be taking place on 26–27 June, 133 Houndsditch, London. The Call for Speakers will close on Monday 20 February 2023. So please consider if you have an idea for a talk you would like to submit, as it would be good to have some Health & Care content.