Crew guide
Nobody gets a refund for the benefit you did not use
A lot of crew quietly avoid claiming, in case using the medical benefit looks bad. It is worth understanding where that money actually sits, because the usual worry rests on an assumption about the money that is not how group cover works.
Who pays whom, and when
Three parties, and the order matters more than people expect.
Your company buys the cover and pays the premium
Group medical cover is bought in advance for the workforce, and the premium is paid whether or not any particular person ever claims. By the time you are deciding whether to book an appointment, that money has already left the company. It is spent. There is no version of the year where you decline to claim and the company gets that money back.
The insurer holds it and delivers the benefit
From that point the entitlement sits with the insurer and its claims administrator — not in a pot on your manager’s desk. When you claim, you claim from them. They assess it against your plan and pay it.
On 31 December, whatever is left simply stops existing
It is not banked, not carried into next year, and not returned to anyone. An unused pot is not a saving. It is the one outcome where the premium bought nothing at all.
“But will it cause trouble?”
The honest answers, including where the honest answer is “check, don’t take our word for it”.
Does my claim cost my company money each time?
Not per claim. The premium is set in advance for the group as a whole, so an individual visit does not generate a bill to your employer the way a company credit card would. Renewal pricing for a large group is driven by the whole population’s pattern over time, not by whether one crew member had physiotherapy in March.
Will my manager see what I claimed for?
Your claim goes to the insurer and its administrator, not through your line manager, and medical claim detail is normally handled as confidential health information under the scheme’s own privacy terms.
We cannot promise you what any specific employer can or cannot see — that is set by your scheme’s privacy terms and your company’s policy, not by us. If this is the thing genuinely stopping you, it is a fair question to put to HR or your union, and it is a reasonable thing to ask before you claim rather than after.
Will claiming this year shrink my cover next year?
Your entitlement is set by your plan and your rank, not by how much of last year’s pot you used. Using it does not demote you to a smaller pot in January. Equally, not using it does not earn you a bigger one — there is no no-claims bonus here.
Is physiotherapy the kind of thing this is meant for?
Outpatient physiotherapy is a named line on the benefit, alongside GP and specialist visits — see your own claim statement, which lists it explicitly. You are not stretching the scheme by using it for a shoulder that has been nagging for four months. That is the intended use.
The pot resets on 1 January. Nothing crosses over.
One shared pot per calendar year, covering GP, specialist, physiotherapy and other outpatient care. Investigations and Complementary Therapies each hold a limit of their own.
If you are promoted
How big your pot is depends on your rank, so a change of rank changes your entitlement rather than leaving you on the old figure for the rest of the year. After a promotion takes effect, it is worth reading your entitlement again instead of assuming the number you memorised last year still applies.
We deliberately do not publish rank-by-rank figures — they change, and a stale number here would be worse than none. Read the current figure off your own statement, which shows what is left on every line.
What to do now
In the order that wastes the least of your time.
Look up what is actually left
Two minutes in the Medical Members Portal. The exact screens are here. Decide with the real number in front of you, not a guess.
If something has been bothering you, book it
The thing you have been working around for months is the thing this is for. Under the Scheme a session is HK$1,980, of which HK$990 is settled with Foundation credits you earned and HK$990 in cash — the full breakdown is on the Scheme page.
Claim it properly
Pay and claim protects your pot better than direct billing does, for reasons that surprise most crew. That comparison is here, and you can rehearse the claim form before you fill in the real one.