[Event] Mr. Zhou, a resident of Wuchang District, Wuhan City, Hubei Province, was hospitalized due to illness, and his family lost its source of income. After receiving the "early warning information", the staff of the Civil Affairs Bureau immediately contacted the street and community staff for on-site inspection. After assessment, Mr. Zhou was identified as meeting the social assistance standards, and soon completed the basic living allowances and supplementary medical insurance for people in need. The system's automatic screening, staff's household inspection, and social assistance information construction have improved the quality and efficiency of relief work and ensured the lives of people in difficulty.

[Comments]

Social assistance is a basic institutional arrangement in the social security system. When people encounter difficulties in their basic life, how to find them in time and help them quickly is always the focus and difficulty of social assistance. The Central Economic Work Conference proposed that "we should strengthen the social security network and improve the hierarchical and classified social assistance system." It is an inevitable requirement to promote the timely progress and further development of relief work, which is related to the happy life of people in need and social fairness and justice, and is to improve people's well-being.

Make good use of technology to enable more timely rescue. Mr. Zhou's timely assistance is due to the information construction of social assistance in Wuchang District. Based on the low-income family information database, the local civil affairs bureau has established a monitoring and early warning mechanism in six dimensions, including age structure, economic status and health status. Once the early warning score is reached, the suspected families with difficulties will be screened out by the system, and then the staff will check in the home to further judge the degree of family difficulties and the causes of difficulties. Improve the active discovery mechanism, promote the organic combination of "big data+iron footplate", and provide important support for early discovery, early rescue, and early assistance.

Discovery is the first step, so that the people in need can really enjoy the policy dividend, and the level of assistance should be constantly improved. In recent years, Guangdong Province, Yunnan Province and other places have improved the urban and rural minimum living standards; Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, in addition to providing necessary visiting care services for the elderly, the disabled and minors who cannot take care of themselves among the low-income population, also carries out different types of assistance projects such as psychological counseling, ability improvement and social integration according to the actual situation; In Xining City, Qinghai Province, in view of the family situation of some poor people, the local government not only included them into the minimum living standard according to the "single person insurance" policy, but also provided community public welfare posts for their families. The tailored rescue plan timely responded to the diversified needs of the rescue objects, promoted the transformation of social assistance from "survival" to "risk prevention" and "development promotion", and made the rescue more accurate, more powerful and more effective.

Social assistance resources are valuable, and every penny should be made effective. In recent years, the civil affairs department has extended the coverage of the people in need from the target of subsistence allowances and the extremely poor to the members of the marginal families of subsistence allowances and the members of the families with rigid spending difficulties. The coverage has been further expanded, and efforts have been made to ensure that "all the people in need should be protected and all the people in need should be saved". The report on the implementation of China's fiscal policies in 2023 shows that 156.683 billion yuan of relief subsidies for people in need were issued in a timely manner throughout the year, and social security was further secured. To improve the quality and efficiency of social assistance, we should also speed up the improvement of the mechanism of "withdrawal should be made as soon as possible". For example, Guizhou Province has built a two-way verification mechanism of "error proofing" and "leak proofing" to timely return unqualified objects. A two pronged approach can ensure that social assistance resources flow to those who really need them.

There is no trivial matter in people's livelihood. Social assistance has no end. Only by continuing to promote the reform and innovation of social assistance, pooling relief resources and forces, and promoting the high-quality development of social assistance, can the security network be more closely knit and firmly tied, so that people in need can live a happier and healthier life.