Life insurance specialist TAL has expanded its musculoskeletal underwriting education initiative to help adviser partners and their clients better understand underwriting exclusions for the spine following neck pain and eligibility for an underwriting review.

Gavin Law, TAL musculoskeletal manager, said neck pain is one of the top-five chronic pain conditions in terms of prevalence and years lost to disability, and poses a challenge to underwriting the spine because it can be due to a number of disorders and involve any of the tissues in and around the neck.

“To help support our adviser partners to have well-informed client conversations about neck pain and spinal exclusions, we developed a suite of materials that explain the risk factors associated with neck pain, TAL's underwriting process, and ways to help customers improve their health and wellbeing,” Law said. “We also outline if or when a spinal exclusion could be reviewed and underwritten again.”

Advisers can access the spinal exclusion underwriting factsheets and Managing neck pain information booklets from the TAL Adviser Centre.