S.S.B. Celebrates 43 Years with Open Day  

The Belize Social Security Board will turn forty-three years old on Saturday and to celebrate the occasion, S.S.B. offices around the country held open-day activities with members of the public today. It was June first, 1980, that the first Social Security Office opened its doors. Today, the offices encouraged the public to visit their booths that they had set up and get their blood pressure and glucose tests and oncology nurses were on hand to educate the people about the screening process to identify cancer. S.S.B. offices also encouraged people to do portal sign-ups for their online portal, as Communications and Public Relations Manager, Vanessa Vellos told us.

 

Vanessa Vellos, Communications and PR Manager, S.S.B.

“We still need people to sign up and get their portal account because as we’re transitioning from the paper process more to the digital online process. In addition to that, we’re just telling the general public about the basic services that we offer and also the online services. For example, for sickness benefit, you can load your sickness benefit claim forms online. If you’re an employer, you can load your contribution statements online as well. And you can also pay online. Apart from that what we’re doing is we also are partnering that concept of the 43-year anniversary with wellness services So S.S.B. has adopted the GIVES philosophy and a part of the GIVES philosophy, the I in that word GIVE talks about improved health outcomes. So that’s where the wellness part comes in. And so we have representatives here from the Ministry of Mental Health and Wellness, as mentally you need to be well. It affects your emotions. It affects your how you are on the job and stuff like that. So it’s basically like preventative medicine if you want to look at it that way. We also have representatives from the National Health Insurance N.H.I., and if you need to get your blood pressure checked or sugar test you can come out and you can get that done for free. We have nurses who are doing that today.”