The final must-do of the day after the night before was to try and finish dealing with Direct Line. What a palaver. The previous evening, they were insistent that they would only pay if a) I took Stephanie to hospital and b) I phoned them from the hospital, with the hospital’s fax number and complete contact details for their insurance department so that they could fax release forms over to the hospital us to sign before we left.
Unsurprisingly, no-one in the ER at 3am knew the fax number, and there’s no way the skeleton night staff would have time or capacity to deal with it. You would think that someone at Direct Line might possibly have the half a brain cell required to work that out. But no, they had to be told.
As a compromise, after a lot of too-ing and fro-ing, they agreed that they would email me the documents and I could get them signed and faxed back to them. They were also dubious that they would be able to get a medical report as she was treated as an outpatient – in which case, of course, they would not guarantee to pay.
We couldn’t fax from the hotel, Amy, star customer services manager, invited me into the back office to see if we could work out how to make the fax machine dial internationally. But after about half an hour of pressing all the buttons and resorting to reading the various manuals(!) we had to give up. So we scanned it in and I’ve emailed it. I can only hope it gets there. I specifically asked them to acknowledge receipt but of course there’s been a deafening silence.
I’m grateful my insurance is with someone else, but before I renew I’ll be asking much more detailed questions as I think the ability to call a doctor in what is clearly an emergency is a key requirement.
Note: I know I’m from Yorkshire and therefore tight, but I would have willingly paid myself for a doctor for Stephanie regardless of the cost – if I could have found one! However I misguidedly thought the purpose of travel insurance was to make life slightly easier, not to turn a bad situation into an even more difficult, stressful experience.
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