President of Guyana plans to resolve 10,000 pending National Insurance Scheme cases

Dr Mohamed Irfaan Ali, the President of Guyana, highlighted the roughly 10,000 cases pending under the National Insurance Scheme (NIS), adding that the government is about to take swift and clinical action to resolve these cases.

According to him, the government will now take a proactive approach to the matter instead of a reactive one, stemming the issue at its source.

President Ali is planning on overcoming the many hurdles in his way by setting up a new format with in the NIS with a specialized secretariate which will follow a projectized system. This system will be headed specifically by Holly Greaves, the General Manger of the National Insurance Scheme.

The current projections show that this system will help resolve all 10,000 pending cases by the end of the year. In a statement regarding the same, the President emphasized that, “I wanted to address this issue. This is an issue that we want to fix and we want to make every effort in a specialised, projectised manner to get this fix before the end of the year.”

The President also plans to extend the program beyond its current remit to address nationwide cases, by including 300 claims falling under the diaspora outreach programme.

The National Insurance Scheme has scheduled outreach efforts in November. These will cover New York in the United States of America and Toronto in Canada.

The programme will then be expanded to other territories which will also see the benefits of the scheme proposed. As of now, the aim of the programme is to initially clear the backlog of cases that the NIS is experiencing, and then use the efficiency of the already established system to avoid such a situation in the future.

The fact that the outreach programme brings these facilities to claims beyond the normal remit is a sign if far sightedness and the comprehensive approach being used to mitigate these issues permanently.

Needless to say, this initiative is being appreciated by many. It has to be said though that its effectivity can only be judged by the results it achieves once it is active.