S.S.B. – Taking Care of Stakeholders and Staff while Managing COVID-19

Chandra Nisbet-Cansino

As you heard, Social Security will be amending its regulations to provide cover to persons who are left unemployed as a result of the novel coronavirus. Persons, who have been exposed and so certified by a doctor, will be covered under the sickness benefits of the scheme. The S.S.B. is also instituting practices to protect its own employees and to make it easier to conduct business with them without having to make a physical visit to its offices.  S.S.B. is allowing online processing and the use of drop boxes to protect front line workers.

Chandra Nisbet-Cansino, Corporate Customer Relations, S.S.B.

“For COVID-19, the coverage because of our legislation allows us to, the coverage extends to any quarantine or isolation period that is in relation to COVID-19. So if your doctor says that perhaps you have been exposed to this disease and we need you to go into self-isolation or we need to quarantine you, Social Security will cover that as part of your sickness benefit, but it needs to be certified by a medical practitioner at this time.”

Doug Singh

Doug Singh, Chair, S.S.B.

“We had an incident day before yesterday where I think three or four people came into the Belize City office personally with quarantine forms and it created a situation as you might imagine where it put the staff in a set of circumstances in terms of what do we do. So we are putting in place some procedures for this where we will have a drop box. We already put in place where you don’t have to walk into the office to initiate that claim at that point in time. Normally you had to put your claim in certain amount of days after the illness. We have extended that time and left it relatively open. And this is to protect everyone—people who are waiting in line, our front end staff who are there.”