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The administration of the Social Welfare Department has been making regular communications with social security assistant staff to learn about their difficulties arising from the increasing workload with a view to working out solutions to the problem, a spokesman of the Department said today (Saturday).

The statement was made in response to a protest staged by the Social Security Assistants' (SSA) Branch of the Hong Kong Chinese Civil Servants' Association today to express discontent over the shortage of manpower suffered by this grade of staff.

The spokesman said: "Over the past four years, there has been a 62-per cent increase of manpower for the SSA grade, which should be considered as a significant increase under the present economic situation."

Between 1996/97 and 1998/99, there was an addition of 257 SSAs and another 133 were recruited for the year 1999/2000.

The SSA grade includes the ranks of Social Security Assistant and Senior Social Security Assistant.

The main duty of the SSA grade is to process and vet the applications of various schemes of social security whereas the Social Security Officer grade is responsible for authorising the applications.

About 87 per cent of the cases handled by the SSAs are the elderly cases of the Social Security Allowance Scheme and the Comprehensive Social Security Assistance Scheme, which are generally more straightforward with less complexities.

Commenting on each SSA handling some 700 cases, the spokesman clarified that as the complexity and handling procedures for every case were different, time spent on each case would not be the same and therefore merely the caseload would not directly reflect the actual workload.

In order to relieve the work pressure of the staff, the administration have instructed the managing staff to flexibly deploy the manpower with reference to the workload of individual social security field units.

The priorities of various job duties would also be reviewed in a bid to ensure an efficient delivery of service to the public.

In the long run, the Department would implement the following measures to further alleviate the work pressure of the staff:

- to re-edit and to simplify the manual of procedures;

- to study the feasibility of the implementation of risk management and to review the existing working procedures so as to enhance efficiency;

- to introduce a new computerised system by October next year (2000), which will definitely streamline the work flow and help reduce the procedure and time for handling cases.

The spokesman appealed to the SSA staff to follow the civil service team to uphold their duties and responsibilities under limited resources in the benefit of the general public, especially the social security recipients were mostly the elderly, the disabled and those in need of urgent financial assistance.

He stressed that the administration had been keeping close contact with the staff and a series of measures had been carried out to relieve their pressure.

The administration would continue with these efforts to hold discussions with the staff in order to work out ways to solve their problems, he added.

End/Saturday, October 23, 1999

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