Expat families value health and wellness in new survey

In a new survey by Allianz Care, around 73 percent of those people interviewed put health and well being as the top priority as to whether to stay abroad or move back home. In the same survey around 70 percent of respondents said that they moved overseas to achieve a better work/life balance.

Read more on this article from the International Travel and Health Insurance Journal:

Commenting on the findings, Paula Covey, Allianz Partners Chief Marketing Officer for Health, said: “2020 has been a life-changing year for many of us across the world as we deal with the implications of Covid-19. Massive lifestyle changes have been forced on us almost overnight, which in turn have forced us to re-assess how we live our lives and re-evaluate what’s truly important. The same is absolutely true for the ‘expat’ community who are living and working across the globe. This comes across strongly in the increasing prioritisation of health and family.”

Covey explained that the research was ‘extremely useful for Allianz’, allowing the company to understand the challenges and considerations facing the global community in a post-Covid world: “It tells us where we can support in terms of tools, guidance and information,” she said. “It’s unsurprising that distance from friends and family is cited as the main challenge of living abroad (47 per cent), followed by the weather (39 per cent) and cultural differences for 33 per cent of respondents. We can’t change a country’s climate, but we can put services in place to support people’s mental health when they’re dealing with loneliness, missing their friends and family or struggling to adjust. We can also provide support to help people settle into their new home, with guidance on what cultural differences to expect in countries around the world. Listening to our customers means we can constantly adapt our services and offerings to meet ever-evolving healthcare needs. The pandemic has shown all of us just how fast things can change.”

Lastly, Allianz Care was sure to consider how preferences are changing when it comes to using the term ‘expat’ or ‘global citizen’. While term ‘expat’ is still the most popular one that people identify with in 2020 to describe people living and working in a country other than their native one, preferences are changing and differ significantly from country to country, Allianz says: “This community no longer refer to themselves solely as ‘expats’ preferring to use terms such as ‘global citizen’, ‘immigrant’ or ‘international worker’.”

Allianz details that in the UAE, ‘a region traditionally associated with expats’, the term is still widely used by more than three-quarters of people in this category (76 per cent). But that figure falls to 35 per cent in Singapore, under a quarter in the UK (24 per cent) and France (23 per cent) and just 11 per cent in Canada. In these countries, the term ‘global citizen’ is more widely used today, at 48 per cent in the UK, 33 per cent in France, 29 per cent in Singapore and 26 per cent in Canada.