What is domestic and family violence?

Domestic and family violence can happen to anyone. It generally involves violent, threatening or abusive behaviour enacted by a former or current family member, with the intention of coercion or control, causing fear or harm.

Domestic and family violence can include, but isn’t limited to:

• physical violence
• sexual assault
• emotional or verbal abuse
• psychological abuse or controlling behaviour
• stalking
• financial abuse, and
• abuse of older Australians.

The cycle of family and domestic violence is complex. Survivors may struggle with acute issues at a point of crisis, or ongoing issues in the longer term.

We recognise that everyone’s situation and needs are different. We’re committed to supporting our customers and employees when they experience domestic and family violence.

What we can do to help

If you tell us, or we recognise that you are affected by domestic or family violence, we are here to help.

We will ensure employees are appropriately trained so that we can:

• minimise the number of times that you need to disclose information about your situation
• take into account your ongoing communication preferences where possible and ensure adherence to these preferences across our business
• prioritise your safety, by protecting sensitive, private and confidential information
• refer you to specialist services
• engage you with sensitivity, dignity, respect and compassion
• Commitment to you that your family and domestic violence situation will have no adverse effect on your policy if applicable
• Take into consideration family and domestic violence when designing products
• Regularly monitor the customer family and domestic violence policy, its associated procedures, and how it is working in practice in support of customers experiencing family and domestic violence

If appropriate we can also offer the following:

• help you set up a new policy. If you request us to set up a new insurance cover on your life we will work with you directly to establish this cover with as minimum requirements as possible and to do so as quickly as possible whilst maintaining confidentiality of your new insurance arrangements
• provide financial hardship assistance

Your Privacy

We understand the risks of disclosing information in relation to customers experiencing family and domestic violence. In addition to our privacy policy, we will:

• discuss safe ways to communicate with you and record this information
• where possible, accommodate your communication preferences, including the option to communicate with your preferred gender where possible
• ensure that your contact information is secure and confidential
• where possible, give you control over how your personal information is shared with third parties
• there may be times when legislation requires us to disclose information. We will work with you wherever possible in the instances of disclosure. For further information on our Privacy Policy – please go to http://neosgroup.com/privacy-policy

Claims support

NEOS will help support you throughout the claims process. Whilst NEOS doe does not assess claims, we can work with our insurers who committed to ensuring that their claims assessors receive training to offer sensitive claims handling in the following ways:

• minimise repeating of your situation
• not require you to make direct contact with an alleged perpetrator or notify the police about an alleged perpetrator
• be flexible in our approaches to accommodate your needs
• fast-tracking your claim
• providing emergency payments
• reviewing decisions quickly if there is disagreement about cover

If you let us know you are experiencing family and domestic violence, we can better support you during the claims process. It will not have any adverse effect on or prejudice your claim.

Helping our people

We value the needs of our employees and recognise our employees may experience family domestic violence or may experience vicarious trauma after serving affected customers or assisting affected colleagues and will need support in the same way our customers do. We support them by:

• Training to ensure employees are equipped to respond appropriately to customers affected by family and domestic violence. This includes enabling early recognition of customers who are affected by family and domestic violence
• Our staff will seek to provide additional support to enable customers to make informed decisions and maintain access to products and services

• Encouraging employees to realise the importance of early detection of domestic and family violence issues with customers
• Providing family violence leave and support services to all of our employees, if required

• Protecting the details of our employees and/or our representatives
• Provide in-house or external service support to impacted employees

Complaints with respect to our Domestic and Family Violence Policy

If you are not satisfied with our level of support, complaints can be raised using our customer complaints Procedure. We will ensure that complaints are handled promptly and fairly, and that customers are kept informed of progress throughout the process as per our Complaints Policy.