SunLife has made changes to its critical illness definitions.

It says the move will make it easier for customers to claim.

SunLife has moved in-line with the updated ABI best practice. It remains ABI standard on cancer and stroke definitions but has improved the heart attack definition to become ‘ABI+’. as

Mark Jones (pictured), protection director at SunLife, said: “We have enhanced our heart attack definition to make it a little easier for customers to claim for heart attack. The ABI definition states that Troponin levels must be at least 0.2 whereas our definition has no specific level just a ‘rise of biochemical cardiac specific markers’.

“Most critical illness products have great long lists of illnesses, making it difficult for customers to be confident that they understand what is and isn’t covered; we wanted to do something different.

“Cancer, heart attack and stroke make up nearly 80% of critical illness claims, and our qualitative research found that the majority of customers were unable to name any additional illnesses that they would expect to see covered over and above cancer, heart attack and stroke.

“Using this information we decided to bring to the market a critical illness product that is straightforward and affordable; our cover is available from £5 a month and is easy to understand as it covers just the three critical illnesses – heart attack, stroke and cancer.

“Initially we had expected that the critical illness take-up rate would be around 20-30% however our simplified approach has seen over half of our customers choose to add CI since we launched in September 2014.”