The NLV Health Insurance Certificate
A Sanitas policy produces more than one document, and they do different jobs. The certificate is the one produced from your policy for your visa application; the conditions are the contract; the schedule holds your own policy’s specific terms. The certificate is what goes in your visa file, so it is the one to check line by line before you submit anything.
Which document is which.
This is the confusion the page exists to remove. “The certificate” is not one document, and the answer to a question about it can sit in a different document altogether.
The General Conditions
The terms for the product — what is covered, what is excluded, and how the policy operates. These are the same for everyone holding that product, and they are the document to read if you want to know what you have actually bought.
The Particular (Individual) Conditions — your policy schedule
Your policy’s specifics, and not a formality. The General Conditions expressly delegate copayment amounts, reimbursement percentages and capital limits to this document. Where a figure is personal to your policy, this is what carries it — which is why a general answer to “what’s my excess?” is worth very little.
The product information document
Sanitas’s official summary of the product, useful for orientation and admirably explicit about its own limits: it states on its face that it is a summary, and that the complete contractual information is in the General and Particular Conditions.
The certificate
The document produced from your policy for your visa application. What it is for is straightforward. What it says, field by field, is something to check on your own copy rather than take from a general description — see the checking table below.
Still choosing a product?
The document set follows the product. See the Sanitas NLV options guide, or go straight to Residents or Residents Platinum.
Checked before it matters, not after.
A document problem found before submission is an administrative task. The same problem found afterwards is a delay sitting in someone else’s queue, on someone else’s timetable, with your travel plans attached to it.
So the useful thing is to go through the actual documents against the list below — the names exactly as they appear on the passports being used, the dates against the timeline you are submitting, every insured person present, and the product you actually applied for. Ask us and we can do that with you.
- It is a short conversation, and it costs nothing to ask.
- It belongs before anything goes to a consulate, not after.
- Anything wrong is corrected through the insurer — we can raise it and follow it through with you.
- Names as per passport
- Policy dates
- Every insured person
- Product and insurer identity
- Document date and legibility
Checking it, field by field
Once you have the documents in front of you, there is a short pre-submission check worth making: names exactly as the passports spell them, everyone who needs cover named, cover dates as intended, the product name reading Visado, and the wording on copayments, waiting periods, territorial scope and insurer authorisation.
That check has its own page, with the items in the order worth making them and what to do when something does not match.
Where the paperwork comes from.
If something is wrong.
This is routine — documents get details wrong, and the entire question is when you catch it.
1. Find it before you submit
Every step after submission is slower than this one, and none of them are in your control.
2. Identify the field and the correct value
Not “the name is wrong” — the field, and the value exactly as it appears on the passport being used. Precision here is what makes a correction a single round trip instead of three.
3. The correction is made through the insurer
Corrections to a policy document belong to the insurer to make — it is their document that has to be right. We can raise it and follow it through with you.
4. Check the re-issued document against the same list
A corrected document is a new document. It gets exactly the same pass as the first one did — including the fields that were already correct.
One applicant, a couple, or a family.
Each insured person has to be identifiable on the documentation you submit, and each is named from their own passport. An avoidable problem in a couple or family file is one person’s name assembled from a form rather than copied from their document — a dropped middle name, one surname where the passport carries two, an accent lost somewhere in the process.
Where a policy covers people under 14, the conditions require their custodians or guardians to be insured as well. That is a policy-structure point rather than a paperwork one, but it is worth knowing before you build a family application around it.
Something we won’t assume
Whether a family receives one document covering everyone, or a document per insured person, is not something we’ll state in general terms — it is confirmed on your own documents during your application. We would rather tell you that plainly than describe a document set we haven’t verified for your case.
The deadline people miss
Once your visa is issued, Sanitas needs a copy within two months of the policy start date. The General Conditions provide that if evidence of visa issuance is not supplied within that period, the contract terminates automatically.
Diarise it on the day you buy the policy. It is the single easiest way to lose cover you have already paid for, and the easiest to avoid.
Check the Particular Conditions issued with your own policy for how the evidence should be sent, and ask us if anything is unclear — we would rather chase it with you than have you discover it later.
What your consulate decides
We can tell you what your policy is, what your documents contain, and whether they are internally consistent and correctly issued. Whether that satisfies the consulate handling your application is their decision, and published requirements differ between consulates and change without notice — so work from the current list published by yours. What NLV insurance requirements involve.
Holding a policy does not mean a visa will be approved. No insurance document can make that decision for the authorities.
Before it goes in the file.
- Every name matches the passport it belongs to, character for character.
- Every person who needs evidence appears on the documentation.
- The start date is the date you meant, and matches the timeline you are submitting.
- The product named is the product you hold.
- The insurer’s identity and registration details are correct.
- The document is dated, and legible in the format you are submitting.
- You have your policy documents as well — they are not interchangeable with the certificate.
- You have re-checked anything that was corrected, in full.
- You have read your own consulate’s current checklist yourself, recently.
Three ways paperwork goes wrong.
None of these are dramatic. That is rather the point — the problems that cost people time are small, boring and entirely catchable.
The name on the form isn’t the name on the passport
Two surnames where the form took one. A middle name dropped because it never gets used. An accent lost between one system and another. The document is issued exactly as the application was completed, which is the correct behaviour and an unhelpful one.
- The fix is trivial before submission and tedious afterwards.
- Which is the whole argument for checking against the passport itself, rather than from memory.
The appointment moved
A date changes downstream of a policy that has already been arranged. Nothing is wrong with the document — the question is whether the start date on it still makes sense against the timeline you are now submitting.
- This is a start-date conversation, not a certificate one, and it is much easier before submission.
- See the start-date guide for how the dates interact.
Two applicants, one document set
Both people are on the policy. The check is that both are identifiable on what you actually submit, each named from their own passport rather than from whoever filled the form in.
- What the document set looks like for more than one person is confirmed on your own documents.
- If anything about how the two of you appear looks ambiguous, that is exactly the thing to raise before submitting.
Request policy and certificate help
Ask us to go through your documentation with you before you submit anything to a consulate — no obligation.
Prefer to talk it through first? Phone and WhatsApp reach the same advisers.