Over the past few years, the Social Insurance Bank (Banco de Previsión Social – BPS) has been promoting and exploring the possibility of using public software rather than creating a new system or issuing a call for tenders to acquire one, with the aim of making optimum use of government resources and to avoid “reinventing the wheel”. The term “public software” is used to describe any piece of software that has been developed using government resources and that should therefore be available for the different government organizations to share.

This good practice presents the training programmes implemented by the Uruguayan social security institute, which have been deemed a substantial qualitative step forward. The strategic plan for 2011–2015 included in its lines of action “the development of modern human resource management policies, honing staff members’ skills and improving the working environment and occupational health in the organization”.

As part of its policies to promote a social security institution that is more effective and efficient and closer to the people, allowing their quality of life to be improved, a strategy for multi-channel services has been drawn up with the aim of offering citizens different channels of customer service depending on their needs.

E-training has come to the fore as a means of enabling training programmes to be offered to the organization’s officials on a large scale. Until now, the method has relied on so-called Virtual Learning Environments (VLE), and more specifically the Moodle platform, which is used by the institution.

The aim is to improve this training method by adopting videoconferencing as an e-training tool, using synchronous techniques to enable real-time interaction between speakers in different locations and, with other strategies, to replicate on-site courses.

The Social Protection Longitudinal Survey (Encuesta Longitudinal de Protección Social – ELPS) was part of the “support program for better management of the social protection system”, which aims to strengthen the capacity to formulate and implement policies on social security, education, housing, employment, health, disability, and care among other things. Therefore, the conditions and capacities required to continue with future ELPS phases were generated, with the Social Insurance Bank (Banco de Previsión Social – BPS) as the managing institution.

The Catholic Workers’ Circle of the Uruguay Mutual Fund (Círculo Católico de Obreros del Uruguay Mutualista – CCOUM) is part of the integrated national health system in Uruguay. In this regard, it is a provider of total health coverage as it has been a link of the country’s social security system thanks to its mutual structure.

Currently, it has approximately 92,529 members and 2,239 workers, 679 (31 per cent) of whom are nursing staff.

Improving the quality of services is an ongoing task that involves multiple dimensions such as listening to and evaluating the participants, transparency, excellence and investment in training as the main focus.

Hospitalization is an experience that involves both physical and emotional risks for the patient and family as well as institutional costs. Lowering these is the challenge of this good practice.

Often, the interests of workers and employers are not the same, so addressing absenteeism as it relates to the health and safety of workers is an ethical and social commitment.

This good practice aims to reduce absenteeism arising from respiratory, musculoskeletal, mental and cardiac diseases, which are among the most frequent conditions among workers of the Catholic Workers’ Circle of the Uruguay Mutual Fund (Círculo Católico de Obreros del Uruguay Mutualista – CCOUM).

To be more effective and efficient in the administration of economic benefits, the Social Insurance Bank (Banco de Previsión Social – BPS) has implemented an automated solution to manage benefits based on the processing of information and current regulations, and providing access to benefits without requiring beneficiaries to go to customer care centers.

To obtain a benefit, the process begins with the authorized benefit provider completing the requisite information through the available Web functionalities. 

The national reference center for birth defects and rare diseases (Centro de Referencia Nacional de Defectos Congénitos y Enfermedades Raras – CRENADECER) is a unit of the Social Insurance Bank (Banco de Previsión Social – BPS). The center for access to assistive technologies (Centro de Acceso a Tecnologías de Apoyo – CATA) is located therein, and its goal is to approach disability in a way that promotes equal opportunities in relation to technology, using computers to assist with rehabilitation.